


and explosions are louder in space because there's no air to get in the way

by fascinationex



Series: bleach works by fascinationex [15]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alien Biology, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Assassination Attempt(s), M/M, Minor Character Death, Size Kink, Space Stations, Violence, tesla is painfully gone on nnoitra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:43:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15338151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: One week, two massacres, five orgasms and absolutely no explosions. In space.





	and explosions are louder in space because there's no air to get in the way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [birble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/birble/gifts).



> This fic is a (belated) gift for tumblr user teslalindocruz's birthday.
> 
> I'm putting warnings in the end note, so you can avoid seeing them if you prefer to go in blind. Otherwise, check the end notes for warnings. There are several.

Tesla fell in love on a Wednesday.

Well. To clarify, it wasn't exactly a Wednesday because now that he'd crossed over into Bredtopia-controlled space, he was living on a ten day week and Wednesdays did not exist. And it would probably be pushing it to call it love, precisely -- it was more like a kind of gut-deep lust so pure it impaired the basic functions of his brain.

He was up much earlier than he’d intended to be, since at ten that morning - space station time, not even related to the planet side time zone Tesla had been living in for months -- the space station commenced an emergency drill. 

Tesla’s room on the station had been advertised under ‘budget options’ and it showed. It was still prohibitively expensive for Tesla -- the price had been jacked up because his arrival coincided with some kind of royal tour around Bredtopia, and the princess was passing through at the same time. Princess Inoue was so well loved in her own kingdom that people came from planets away just to see her walk past.

But Tesla's room could have been a cut-price room on any space station in the allied empire. It was a closet. It had a low bed bolted into the wall and a bright, buzzing light. It had the same atmospheric controls as every other room on the station, at least, which meant that when Tesla had arrived eight hours ago he’d queued up absolute darkness and no sounds, then flopped onto his face on the bed and been dead to the world since.

There was an announcement that Tesla half-heard through the sweet glaze of sleep, distantly registering the voices that cycled through different languages. Then an alarm sounded, blaring a long, flat, grating tone across every speaker and outlet in the station.

Tesla twitched awake. His heart pounded with sudden alarm. In the soundproofed darkness of his tiny room the sudden noise was excruciating. 

He scrunched up his face and covered his ears. The loud noises had him well and truly awake, and it was immediately obvious that there would be no getting back to sleep any time soon.

He contemplated reaching for his tablet and wasting time on news sites, but eight hours of sleeping had left him uncomfortably hungry anyway.

"Ghnh." Tesla stumbled up from the bed and pulled on his boots, then leaned on the wall and groggily jabbed the door release button six times with his thumb.

They hissed open, finally, and he blinked in the light outside. The emergency lights were flashing. Coming from the darkness of his room, even the dimmest setting made his eyes water. 

Tesla’s reflection was fuzzy in the glossy metal of the walls outside, but it didn’t disguise that his thick blond hair was a disaster from rolling in his sleep. It tumbled across the short ridge of bone across his forehead and left him looking tired and oddly fluffy.

He wouldn't be able to get away with looking like this when he finally made it to his last placement, but Tesla was stuck on the space station for another week at least. Nobody was yet grading him on 'professionalism', so he didn't have to care.

There were shuttles going out before the week was up, of course, but Tesla wasn’t leaving until he could get one of the subsidised ones with the other medical staff. The royal tour had made cheap accommodation and cheap travel equally impossible, and one thing was the same across the entire galaxy: students were poor.

Not one of the royal retinue was staying in rooms as cheap as Tesla’s, as far as he'd been able to tell -- not even their guards or servants.

In theory Tesla would be able to make some actual money after completing his certificate of competency and getting his full license... but until then, he had to be careful. Even paying for accommodation on the station was going to be cheaper than the cost of a full price shuttle fare.

The sirens finally stopped screaming as Tesla made it out of the hostel area and into the much brighter shopping district. Like most of the station, it was contained within a huge steel tube, which meant that it looked like nothing so much as a large, broad corridor lined with shop fronts. The roof above was rounded and the far wall of each store sloped down to its floor. The overhead lights were pale and a little too bright for Tesla's eyes, and the district they illuminated was packed, because, like any space station, here there were no local taxes on sales.

The clothes and species of the shoppers packing the space varied wildly. There were some who were pink and hairless and fleshy, some with hard bony scales, some with nervously waving eye stalks. Tesla saw wings, somewhere amidst the crowd: huge dark leathery ones held awkwardly aloft so they didn't drag on the smooth-polished floor, painted blue and white in intricate streaks.

Over the public address system a pleasant voice was talking while Tesla paused and blinked: “This concludes our test of the emergency alarm system. Please respond to any future alarms as though they indicate a genuine emergency situation. Thank you.”

The message was repeated in several languages -- including one hexapodal one full of hissing and clicking that Tesla couldn’t make heads or tails of at all, and in his own native morphozic. At least their translation was good, that was something. 

Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep had left Tesla uncomfortably hungry, so as he merged seamlessly into the throng of shoppers he kept his eye out for food. His body needed an enormous number of kilocalories day to day, and it could be dangerous to underfeed himself for long.

He was wandering a convenience store and contemplating whether or not it was acceptable to eat chocolate for breakfast -- and leaning strongly towards 'yes’ since it was delicious, on sale, and met his primary nutritional requirement of being massively calorific, even if he had no idea what it could possibly be made of in this part of space -- when he heard the low, harsh-voiced commotion in the ringing quiet following the last public announcement.

He looked up to see what it was. 

“--cannot just tell them that 'if it was your job you’d blow up the station'. The princess almost had vapours, Nnoitra, I swear--”

The woman talking was tall and pretty, with a fall of wavy green hair, bare biceps that were impossibly toned, and an expression of overwhelming irritation. There was a curious red birthmark across her nose. She had a fierce grip on the arm of a man next to her, and was using it to pull him close -- all the better to tell him off without actually yelling, as far as Tesla could see. 

The arm she was gripping so hard was one of four, and the man they belonged to towered over her by at least two feet, if you counted the horns.

He was skinny -- all angular, hard bones and no soft flesh anywhere -- but Tesla could see the clench of muscle and tendon in his long forearms when he balled three of his hands into fists.

The fourth hand was carrying an enormous firearm with a glowing yellow indicator on its butt, and which looked more like a cannon than a gun. It was propped against his shoulder, but he seemed to support it effortlessly -- even though it probably weighed as much as Tesla did right now. 

The four arms were a clue. They made Tesla’s eyes flick over him for all the other clues, which he found in short order. He had double eyelids, flickering open and closed in agitation, and his face had those high, broad cheeks. They looked like wide cheekbones, unless you were looking for the small changes in texture that indicated the sensory organs right below his eyes -- a second set of light-responsive cells, used for a completely different kind of light. And of course, there were the horns jutting from his dark coarse hair. They extended, curved into a broken circle above his head like a smashed halo. Counting the horns, he was at least eight feet tall -- and his boots put him well over that.

Both the man and he woman were wearing the bands of the royal guard around their arms, but not the full uniform. 

Their argument was not as quiet as the woman seemed to hope.

“If she’s so damned upset about endangering civilians, she needs to pull her head out of her fucking ass --”

The woman twitched. “-- _Oh, for_ \-- Nnoitra, you can't --”

“-- _OUT OF HER FUCKING ASS_ ,” he yelled over her interruption, gesturing broadly with the arm holding the gun. Two nearby shoppers looked up warily at the outburst, saw the weapon, and wisely took the opportunity to leave. “--and stay home when there’s a contract on her!”

Tesla hesitated, frozen. He did not take the opportunity to leave, although he knew he probably should have. Instead he watched the way the big man’s mouth twisted with his ferocious expression.

“Firstly," said the woman, "her work won’t allow that, as you _well know_. Secondly, you cannot be caught talking about our employer like this -- _anybody_ could overhear you here, so try to maintain some decorum. Thirdly, you _absolutely cannot_ suggest to her -- in the presence of her family! -- that a member of our company might ever have _blown up a space station_. Nnoitra, you’re going to jeopardise the reputation of our whole company!”

“It’s the fucking truth, it isn’t my fault she’s so squeamish about it. This is what you get for having a woman in charge.”

Tesla could see the woman take a deep breath. He watched, transfixed, as the man's mouth pulled tight. The overhead lights gleamed on the sharp jagged edges of his horns.

“Regardless of your,” her voice went flat, “ _personal feelings_ on the topic of governance, as your immediate superior--" she raised her voice to be heard over the derisive noise he made at that "-- I require that you remain still and silent in Princess Inoue’s presence for the duration of this contract -- which does not mean you’re to let her die, either; _do not_ make me write you up for malicious compliance.”

Even though he'd been watching and waiting for it, Tesla still flinched at the evident force with which the tall man tore his arm away from her grip.

His pale spidery fingers went tight on the casing of his enormous gun, and for a second Tesla was sure he was going to strike her with it. He seemed primed and tense with some incipient explosion. More than one of the remaining shoppers seemed to sense the impending violence, and made tracks out of the area. 

The woman stared at him, lifted her chin, and said in a positively gelid voice: “ _Try it_."

Tesla swallowed, heart thumping and palms damp with sweat as he watched them from behind the candy stand. Behind his ribs there was a building feeling of -- of heat, of expansion. He wanted to see it when the man lost his temper. He could almost _see_ the blood on the smooth, well-lit floors of the station's shopping district.

Distantly, beyond the thunderous drumming of his heart and the fine shaking in his hands, it was surprising to Tesla that the woman seemed to be the superior officer -- not because of anything about her specifically, but mantoids had been one of his special interest species, and as a culture they were -- 

“Some day a man is going to put you in your place, bitch,” he hissed, looming and threatening and wild eyed. 

\-- Like that. As a culture, they were exactly like that. 

Tesla shuddered at the sound of the man’s terrible voice, that low, threatening hiss, and looked back down at the confectionary display, suddenly aware that this was none of his business. He didn’t want either of them to look up and notice how avidly he was watching. 

He heard the woman’s voice go all sweet and hard, but he was staring blankly at a packet of ketochips -- REAL POTATO, NO CARBS! -- and didn’t see her face when she responded. 

“A man, maybe. But not you, Nnoitra. Never you. Now do what you’re told, and the rest can wait for report time, okay?”

There was the thump of heavy boots on the tiles, and then nothing but the shop assistant busily rearranging products out the back and the mantoid man’s ragged breathing. 

Tesla had the sudden, intrusive and deeply inappropriate thought that he would also like the opportunity to make his breath do that.

“ _Bitch_ ,” the man spat finally, sounding absolutely murderous. 

Tesla didn’t look up again until he heard the staccato click-snap, click-snap of the man storming away in his heeled boots. His tall body rocked with every stride. Tesla bit his lip and watched until he couldn’t see him any more -- and then he leaned out, just a little, searching for the horned silhouette.

“Are you going to get any of those?” asked the shop assistant from right next to him. 

Tesla started. He looked down at the ketochips in his hand. _Ew, no._ They were probably for humans or something. 

“Ah... Pardon me,” he said politely. He grabbed three packages of chocolate and then hesitated, trying to think about how many units of energy he needed versus how unhealthy it was and how much money he actually had to spend -- and not about the mantoid alien with the mean mouth and the pretty purple eyes. 

Four hands. Shit. Tesla had seen them with four _legs_ before, but--

Chocolate. _Chocolate_. He needed to pack away the kilocalories and the chocolate was on sale.

“Yeah,” muttered the shop assistant, twitching one lavender eye stalk unhappily, “I thought they were going to kill each other for a second then. Can you even call security on security?”

“Hm,” said Tesla without committing to that conversation, because he didn't enjoy lying and calling security had been the last thing on his mind.

No, he’d need at least four packages, or he’d get hungry again later and then he’d be in trouble.

“Here, I’m buying these.”

“Oh. Cool, thank you. Having a film night or something?” the assistant wondered, heading back to her station to scan the chocolate. 

“What? No.” What an odd thought. 

The assistant paused, but then clearly decided not to comment, and Tesla shrugged it off. Maybe chocolate was a celebratory food only for her species. Many people responded poorly to sugar or dairy or both... Mantoids, for example, could only usually eat flesh--

Tesla nearly rolled his eyes at himself. _Enough._ Enough about the pretty alien man.

Although... he’d really looked like he could snap Tesla in half...

“Enjoy your, uh, kilogram of chocolate,” said the shop assistant. Her eyestalks bobbed in an uncertain smile. 

“Thank you,” said Tesla automatically. He probably would not enjoy it. Not after the first block, anyway. Meat would have been better, but meat was expensive -- especially out in the middle of nowhere space.

Tesla wandered for another half hour or so, but it seemed like half the station was closed to the public for the exclusive use of the royal family. Not only was it crawling with people in the uniforms of their soldiers, but the more Tesla looked, the greater number of those arm bands he noticed -- just like the ones on the arms of the arguing pair from earlier.

They were all well armed, but Tesla could not help but notice that none of them was carrying a gun that weighed as much as an average-sized person. Shame.

If there was really some threat of assassination, all this caution and security made a lot more sense. Despite understanding that, Tesla was still annoyed that there wasn’t anything much to do around the station -- the hangar bays were absolutely off limits, along with a big chunk of the shops and even the unexciting but time-wasting ‘History of Space Flight 4950 DX - 5150 DX’ exhibit. 

Most of the soldiers were very polite when they turned Tesla away from every interesting area of the station, but they were still turning him away. If he had to be here for at least a week, this was gong to be a long week. 

In the end he perched on the steps outside a maintenance access door -- right in front of the DO NOT OBSTRUCT sign, in fact -- and ate half a kilogram of chocolate without really tasting much of it. Three thousand kilocalories was nearly enough for breakfast, as long as Tesla wasn’t doing very much with himself. Since there was apparently nowhere to go and nothing to do... he crumpled the second wrapper and dumped it in a recycling bin. 

When he got up, though, he nearly collided with a towering figure dressed in one of the arm bands of the ancillary soldiers, and -- 

“Get out of the way!” snarled a voice that Tesla's gut recognised before his brain did. When he looked up -- and up -- he caught two huge eyes in an angular face.

This close he could see the skin texture of the mantoid’s face where it changed between real skin and camouflaged sensory organs over his cheekbones.  

Tesla had opened his mouth to tell him to watch where he was going, then, but he swallowed and his face went all hot and he could _feel_ something stupid coming on, and what he said instead was a fumbling, “I... I’m, oh, I'm sorry."

The man dropped his long, gesturing arm and eyed Tesla suspiciously. “Well. Good,” he said, and his eyebrows furrowed in wary confusion as he stared down. “Watch where you’re going better.”

“Right,” said Tesla, still staring into his face. He stepped sideways blindly to let the man pass --

\-- and collided with a woman carrying three books and a baby, which immediately changed colour and began to hiss and snap.

“Hey!” she squawked. 

“Watch where you’re going," Tesla snapped right back at her.

Then he paused, because the soldier was right there. He'd _just_ told Tesla to watch where he was going. Tesla's face, if possible, got even hotter. 

...He must have thought Tesla was such an idiot. He could see a cleaners’ closet. Maybe he could just climb right in and not come out again until he was sure everybody was gone.

While Tesla was thinking this, the soldier laughed at him -- shit, he had a mean laugh, but it was loud and unself-conscious -- and left. Tesla turned helplessly, like a plant growing towards the sun, to watch the roll of the man’s stride.

He must have had the longest legs in the galaxy and Tesla could imagine them vividly, hooked right around his hips. 

His arms were obviously really strong, too, because Tesla had seen him slinging that huge gun around one-handed. He had the extremely graphic mental image of strong, lean-muscled thighs, _clenching around his skull, trembling and_ \--

“For goodness’s sake, the least you can do is help me pick this up,” the woman he’d knocked into complained.

Tesla glanced away from the dark, horned head towering over everyone else’s. The woman’s problem was clear -- she’d have to put the baby down to get the books. 

“Sorry,” said Tesla blankly, and he bent to collect them for her. By the time he was finished balancing them in her arms, the big soldier was gone. Of course.

Tesla went back to his closet-sized room and read six articles about the royal tour -- none of which mentioned anything about a possible assassination or even the increased security.

Most of the articles he found were just gushing praise of Princess Inoue's bold fashion mixed with a few tiny drops of politics -- usually if they'd managed to get a comment from her, she redirected the discussion from her shoes to upcoming policy changes or charitable works she was especially in support of. The articles were all quoting the same interview (except two, whose writers had dug up interviews from several years ago in the hopes of constructing a more compelling headline). Tesla rapidly tired of seeing the same smiling picture of Princess Inoue Orihime with her bright hair elaborately plaited into tiny flower-shaped clasps of gemstones and precious metals.

One article about the tour, in passing, did mention that the princess had hired the services of a reputable company to pad out the skeleton staff of her existing guards since they’d be far from home, but it didn’t make it seem as though there was a particular threat. Obviously, though, there was.

Feeling like he ought to be a little bit ashamed (he was not), Tesla looked up the company. It was a group called 'Nights & Co. Strategic Outcomes,' which seemed like a surprisingly nondescript name for a bunch of mercenaries. They were renowned for their services, but it did not seem, even to Tesla's inexpert eyes, as though they typically did bodyguarding or real security work -- instead their site seemed to indicate that they hired out entire groups of mercenaries as soldiers in conflicts across the better part of the galaxy.

There were _testimonials_. A mercenary group with testimonials. Was that... normal?

Tesla trawled though their available documentation until he found a reference to a Commander Nelliel Tu Odelschwank, which he followed back to her image. He recognised the mark across her nose immediately. Yes, that was definitely the woman from earlier, although nobody working under her had one of those weird, consonant-heavy names of the mantoids.

She'd said she was his superior officer. Maybe the mantoid wasn’t very highly ranked..?

It took Tesla an hour and a half (alright, starting to feel a little ashamed now, or at least a bit pathetic) to find out who the man even was: a highly ranked but poorly decorated commander, hidden on a page with no pretty testimonials. The picture was not a portrait, either -- it was something cut from a candid shot. It was hard for Tesla to call it unflattering, exactly, because his face went hot just looking at the image, but its subject did not look very happy to be there. 

All this, Tesla decided, stood to reason. That guy seemed like a public relations disaster just waiting for a place to happen. 

He was still hot like burning. 

 _Nnoitra Gilga_. It was easier than most mantoid names. Tesla wondered if they’d changed the spelling to make it seem less intimidating. Mantoids as a species were not that common and their language groups were virtually obsolete. They couldn't reproduce with most other species and they had originated on exactly one planet -- and that one had been rendered uninhabitable in one of their many, many civil wars, in the same catastrophic event that had wiped most of them out. Even during his special research project on them, Tesla had never encountered a mantoid who'd expressed the least grief about losing their home planet.

Tesla ate the other half-kilo of chocolate for dinner. Six thousand kilocalories was enough for an inactive period, in theory -- as long as Tesla did not try to change into his alternative shape -- but even that much fat and sugar left his stomach nagging with hunger and his head a little fuzzy. He was feeling kind of grumpy, too. He might have to give up the pretense of saving any money by finding either specialty foods -- which would be a terrible expense -- or sucking it up and buying just... more food.

Forget micronutrients, Tesla wasn’t picky. He just needed the energy.

The next morning -- and the next, and, _please, somebody help him stop making this stupid decision over and over again_ \-- Tesla went to the same set of maintenance access doors for breakfast. The mercenary stalked past every single time, because this route was clearly part of his routine. He didn’t seem to notice Tesla watching for him.

Tesla had a lot of time to kill, but it was still kind of sad and ridiculous that watching a beautiful and angry man storm through the space station every morning was easily the highlight of his day. That didn’t seem very well adjusted, and Tesla’s psych lecturer probably would have had several things to say about this kind of behaviour. 

Tesla...

Well, mostly Tesla wondered if his horns made good handles. He’d bet they would.

After his daily ritual of low-key stalking over a nutritious breakfast of pure chocolate, Tesla mostly wandered. He could not get into most areas of the station in the proper ways because of the intense security, but the maintenance tunnels were a maze -- and mostly deserted.

Tesla wondered if that was an oversight on behalf of the princess's security services. If it was, he wasn't about to tell them because it was the last entertainment left to him. He wandered in their dim lights and echoing stairwells with his headphones blaring for hours at a time. It was interesting to see where he’d come out, sometimes -- and, well. He was deathly bored. By the end of the week he was pretty sure he’d know the whole station by heart. 

  
* * *

That routine broke on the fourth day, when there was an assassination attempt on the royal family. 

Tesla didn’t know that this was what it was until well after the fact. The first he knew about any kind of disturbance at all was when he was sitting, eating an entire carton of ice cream and waiting to catch another glimpse of Nnoitra Gilga.

There was no announcement of a drill this time. There was just the sudden, ear-piercing blast of the emergency sirens. 

Tesla twitched and nearly dropped his mostly full carton of ice cream. He stopped, glancing up toward the ceilings where the speakers were embedded, hesitating. 

A prerecorded voice advised that they were to make a calm and orderly evacuation in several different languages. Lights flashed around the broad walkway of the shopping district.

Tesla jammed his spoon deep inside the ice cream in his carton. He put the lid back on and tucked it carefully under one arm. It would end badly if he didn't get to eat eventually.

Then he got to his feet and headed for the hangar level of the space station. No doubt he was going to pay through the nose for an evacuation, but he’d be better off in debt than dead, surely. He’d lose the things left in his room, but he had his money and ID, and most of the rest was replaceable. It wasn’t worth going back for it, if it really was an emergency. 

Although he could hear one or two harried shop staff trying to get annoyed or recalcitrant customers to leave -- “Yes,” one woman with long, five-jointed fingers said loudly from two shops away, waving her strange hands, “it is a real alarm, please follow the instructions! I will come too.” -- most of the passengers seemed at best unsure. Several looked around and decided, like Tesla, not to chance it. 

The huge tube-shaped corridors of the station were sleek and pale, and they rapidly filled with people shuffling toward their destination. The sirens and flashing lights lent it all a surreal quality -- the nightmare migration of increasingly edgy evacuees.

Tesla smelled smoke -- bitter, acrid, vile stuff, from burning synthetics -- long before he saw the damage, and before he even heard the screaming. Tesla’s ears and nose were more sensitive than many of the evacuees' along the way.

He sped up, under the sudden terrible premonition that the evacuation route might be blocked off --

And so it was. Behind the smoke, the huge corridor was obstructed by a collapsed section of roofing. And behind that was a sealed airlock.

In front of all that, though... was a scene of carnage. 

There were singe marks on the walls, light fixtures were broken and sparking ominously, some clear fluid had leaked across the floor, making everything extra shiny and dangerous, and there were -- there were dead bodies, and people injured amid the smoke and the sparking fixtures and the flashing lights. A lot of them. Bright blood spilt across the burnished floors, filling in the cracks before continuing along, seeping slowly even as the passengers kept arriving in the hopes of an orderly evacuation.

The bodies sprawled like broken toys on the floor were in a mix of those in the royal guard uniform and those in dark, drab, unmarked clothing. Tesla’s training made him categorise the injuries even as his stomach lurched to think that he might be in similar danger -- there were burns from the standard-issue blasters, of course, but also blunt trauma from collisions with something large and heavy, exit wounds from a really, really high-calibre weapon, archaic-looking stab wounds that didn’t look accidental, not like the injuries he'd seen on placement...

It wasn’t just the dead and grievously injured standing in the mess, though. 

Tesla's eyes skimmed the injured and the dead and were drawn, inexorably, to Nnoitra Gilga.

His boots were painted so thickly with blood from the floor that they looked like something coated in smooth seamless chocolate. One of his hands had been blasted -- blasted off, hideously, leaving only a grizzly, blackened stump that ended midway down his long forearm. He had a woman in one of his other arms, hooked around the ribs and yanked tightly into his side, and his two other hands had a steady grip on his enormous gun.

That explained... A lot of the injuries, actually.

The woman was screaming loudly enough to be heard over the alarms -- not words, really, just huge gulping cries of panic. Tesla realised with a start that he’d seen that face before, although less bloodied, and with her makeup less of a streaky mess -- it was Princess Inoue.

Oh. That was -- Tesla balked, finally. THAT was bad, in a way that the pure carnage of it had not been bad. That was bad on a much broader and more impactful level than a minor massacre.

Next to Nnoitra's boot, someone's fingers twitched reflexively. Their arm was not connected to a shoulder, but they twitched anyway, ticking in time to the remaining impulses in their nerves.

One of the injured bodies on the floor lurched up, and in the same instant one of Nnoitra's arms lashed out. His gun slammed against the assassin's skull with a wet crunch, and it pulped like a melon under the sudden impact. 

The princess, if possible, yelped louder, and was immediately echoed by several voices from the growing crowd of horrified onlookers. Tesla twitched at the noise. 

The mercenary was hot. Tesla felt it viscerally, gut deep. He felt shivery all over, torn between being frightened and being helplessly turned on by his aggressive and violent competence. But, he reminded himself, through the thob of his pulse and the almost-pleasant nervousness in his belly, the mercenary was not hot enough to prevent Tesla evacuating the space station in a timely manner.

He looked away from the slick dribbling of blood down the heel of the man's boot. He edged around the circumference of that bloody conflict, dodging the milling and panicking crowd and ignoring the sound of the princess crying like her heart was breaking.

He went to look at the air lock, picking his way through to keep his shoes more or less clean. It looked like, even behind the obstructive mess and the many, many bodies, the smoke just got thicker and darker. Tesla took a deep breath, wrapped his sleeve over his mouth and nose, and then darted through to have a look. 

His eyes watered almost immediately, but it only took a few moments to confirm that, yes, the air lock was secured tightly and fixed in place at this part of the station. He tied the door’s lock function, but it gave him an immediate warning about atmospheric conditions on the outside. Either it was faulty, which meant he couldn’t fix it anyway -- he wasn’t an engineer -- or it WASN’T faulty, which meant the actual station was damaged and there would be no life support systems available to them on the other side of the airlock. 

Tesla left it. As he navigated his way back through the smoke and debris, he tried to think of another evacuation route, grinding his teeth against the noise of the alarms and the sounds of increasing hysteria. He was pretty familiar with the station’s layout by now, and -

“STOP FUCKING SCREAMING,” roared Nnoitra over the sounds of people panicking and the wail of the sirens. Tesla emerged from the thickest smoke to see him wrench the princess into the air by a grip on her biceps and shake her like a naughty kitten. 

The princess let out one last terrified shriek, but then she stopped making any noise at all, staring instead in terror at ... well, Tesla supposed he was technically her guard, although he evidently wasn't very good at client relations.

There was still a circle around the mercenary and the princess where nobody seemed to want to go, like the world’s largest bubble of personal space filled with dead and dying people. Tesla picked his way right across it, trying to stick to the least bloody patches. Outside that circle, people were milling in confusion, conferring with family and friends, trying to figure out what to do now. 

“Nelliel, you _stupid piece of shit whore_ \--” Nnoitra bellowed into his communicator somewhere behind Tesla, “--they’ve cut off the fucking evac route, they’re going to take he whole station out -- don’t patronise me, bitch! I fucking _told you_ \--”

The noises of the alarms and the crowd all talking at volume to one another quickly drowned him out as Tesla struggled through. He knew that if he transformed he would have no trouble at all with the crush of people -- but a single transformation would also be enough to wipe him out without more energy.

There was no guarantee of food in the next several hours, except for the ice cream tucked under his arm -- which wouldn't even be good for more than a day under normal circumstances.

So instead he said ‘Sorry,’ and ‘Excuse me,’ over and over. As a last resort, he sharply applied his elbows.

It didn’t do him much good. Despite the crowd and the lights, Tesla raced across the space station in record time, only to discover that the other evacuation route was also obstructed -- which meant that none of the increasingly panicked people in the whole station could follow the instructions blaring along with the alarms. 

And there were also the bodies.

Tesla wasn’t squeamish, either by inclination or profession, but there were a lot of bodies. Some of them were all in plain dark clothing like the ones Nnoitra had felled, but a lot of them wore the uniform of the royal guard. 

This was probably what the increased security was meant to prevent.

People were starting to behave more and more erratically as they realised they were trapped, and Tesla could hear more than one argument escalating to a shriek. He leaned against a patch of cold, curved wall and tried to think clearly. 

He was right across from an access door for maintenance personnel, and after a few moments he thought: _duh_. Tesla headed over, cracked the door open and closed it quietly behind him on a cool voice announcing that the life support status of the station was becoming dangerously unstable.

They must have been leaking atmosphere, despite the air locks.

That would kill almost everyone on the station. And... Trapped in a metal tube in the middle of nowhere in space, just waiting among a crowd of panicked people for the air to run out and the station to decompress? Tesla swallowed. That was... A bad way to die. 

Tesla could think of a few worse, but only because he had professional practice. That, waiting, helpless, knowing -- that was a bad way to die.

The sirens weren’t as loud here, and the lights were just the emergency strip at ankle height along the walls, gleaming on the metal stairs. It smelled like hot metal and sweat, and the floor was tacky where bodies had fallen -- and indeed even the maintenance corridors in the belly of the station had seen some fighting, because there were bodies slumped against the walls and sprawled on the landings.

There were a couple of other people here, moving with clattering footsteps in the dim lighting, but they didn’t talk to one another, and all of them moved at different top paces. Tesla saw one alien crawling along the wall, broad hands and bare feet sticking her there against the drag of gravity. She outpaced him within seconds.

When he finally found it, Tesla shoved the door to the hangar exit open --

Just in time to see the lock of an evacuation shuttle _snik_ closed, full of sooty and staring faces. One child pointed toward him and yelled something, and was tugged closer to an adult body. 

The air lock slammed down -- huge, grey and metal and heavy, clanking shut only feet away and giving an ear-popping pneumatic hiss -- for departure, and when it hissed open again -- 

The shuttle was gone. The hangar was a huge expanse of dark metal. It had a cavernous ceiling far above, all uncovered wires and pipes and tubing, which only emphasised how sparsely populated it was with _actual passenger crafts_.

Tesla had missed the evacuation shuttle, and it didn't look like there were others.

He felt sick, and it wasn't just the rising hunger in his belly.

There were shuttles, small crafts, a carrier or two, yes -- but Tesla had no idea how to fly one. He had no idea how even to board one without its owner or operator present to open it. 

An announcement in that same cool voice came over the public address. "Warning: Life support systems failure in ten minutes,” it said pleasantly. 

That was... great. 

Suddenly Tesla wanted to find whatever engineering genius thought _that_ notification was a good idea and wring their neck. Nobody deserved to hear that announcement. 

He stood in panicked and helpless silence for a long, breathless minute, wondering what the hell to do. In that time he began to casually misinterpret every feeling as a symptom of the effects of the failing life support systems -- instead of a symptom of building anxiety, which was just, so much more likely. 

He was interrupted by a commotion from the far entrance to the hangar -- a body stumbled through. He'd seen so many bodies today that Tesla was almost glad to hear this person making frightened noises and gasps -- at least this way Tesla knew they were definitely still alive.

More figures followed rapidly -- two hurled, motionless bodies, and a staggering third, and then -- 

“Third shuttle down, _move!_ ” bellowed a voice. 

The first figure steadied on its feet, glanced wildly around, and dashed for the shuttles.

Tesla caught a glimpse of fluttering pale brown hair and blood-spattered clothes. After a second’s pause, he followed. Third shuttle down. It sounded like whoever they were, they had a shuttle, which meant Tesla was getting on it. 

He raced to catch up to them. 

“Are -- are you --” The voice was breathless but pitched higher, feminine. The person looked sideways at Tesla when he fell in with her, and he realised suddenly that it was the Princess Inoue.

Her hair had come down from its complicated pinnings and streamed behind her, long enough to fall to her waist. She looked like she’d been through the wringer, but she was on her feet, running with a grim expression. She was bruised, battered and scraped, but alive and moving. 

“I’m just a passenger,” Tesla said. She seemed much too out of breath to finish her question.

“That one?” he pointed. He wasn't about to ask and give her the opportunity to deny him access to the shuttle. 

The ship he was pointing at wasn’t a shuttle that filled him with confidence when he looked at it, though. The exterior had even more bangs and scrapes than Princess Inoue did. It looked like someone had tried to fly it through an asteroid belt at full speed. 

“Think -- think so,” she agreed in a gasp. How long had she been trying to run for?

The sounds of fighting behind them drew ever closer -- hard percussive noises, grunts and cries, the occasional buzz of blaster fire. Tesla flinched right along with Inoue at the report of a big weapon, a boom that shook the shuttles around them. They both glanced back when they heard a hissing mantoid curse, which had to be Nnoitra, the four-armed mercenary.

A single figure slipped past, weaving away from the snaking grasp of Nnoitra’s long fingers, and hurtled forward toward Inoue.

“Oh!” She made a strangled sound and flung herself sideways, and out of her pursuer’s path, stumbling against one of the bigger shuttles in the bay. She pushed off from it and kept going, narrowly avoiding getting grabbed. 

Tesla slowed when he came to the banged up shuttle that had been indicated, because there was nowhere else to run.

Still, he felt that none of this was really his problem -- he just wanted to be on that shuttle when it departed. When Inoue darted past him and around the other side of the small ship’s bulk, Tesla pressed himself against the side of the ship to make himself as small a target as possible, and stayed the hell out of the way. 

That turned out to be a good thing, because Nnoitra zoomed through the space Tesla’d been occupying not two seconds later in determined pursuit of the princess. He was bleeding freely, breathing in huge rasping breaths that made his chest heave as it expanded, and as he thundered past he shed three of his own cursing assailants like he was shaking off drops of water.

Tesla didn't want to consider what might have happened had he still been in the man’s way. 

One of the attackers shaken off by Nnoitra rolled to a groaning stop next to the bloodied toe of Tesla's boot. There was watery yellow blood on his mouth and Tesla caught the gleam of the evacuation lights on a sharp, curved tooth.

Inoue yelped somewhere around the other side of the shuttle. A second later, Nnoitra made a deep unhappy grunt that Tesla was sure meant nothing good. He didn't know what was happening around there.

Tesla swallowed down his fear and panic. He just had to figure out how to get between these people and onto the shuttle. Right. He could do that. He clutched his ice cream carton more tightly. 

A hiss of released air emanated from the shuttle and the darkly-dressed attackers all responded with urgency to the sound, rolling and stumbling to their feet. Tesla did not understand more than a few words -- the cursing, mostly -- in the dominant language among them. 

He did not stay to improve his comprehension. However upset Nnoitra might be with his stowing away, Tesla's chances of survival would skyrocket once he was on the shuttle and _off_ the failing space station. He moved carefully toward the hiss of the shuttle doors, trying to draw as little attention as possible. There was no reason for anyone here to be concerned with him rather than with the princess, but anyone stuck on this space station had to be panicking by now -- and panicking people did not think clearly. 

He was so close -- he could see the pool of blue-white light cast by the open shuttle door and hear the details in the hiss and growl of Nnoitra’s nearby cursing --  when something grabbed Tesla’s hair and yanked him backwards into a much, much bigger body. An arm like an iron band fixed itself around his waist, and his own arm was abruptly wrenched up behind his back.

Tesla’s carton of ice cream, which had survived the entire evacuation process thus far, went tumbling across the floor. Its lid popped off, and from the corner of one eye Tesla could see it begin to leak from the lip. 

Tesla's yelp of surprise turned seamlessly into a snarl of anger. 

He slammed his boot heel down into the instep of the person behind him. There was a crunch and a pained wheeze. His captor spat an insult that Tesla half-recognised and didn’t have a good translation for, but their grip on his arm slackened with the shock and pain of it.

Tesla elbowed them around where he thought there should have been ribs, but encountered instead something that felt like -- a carapace? All that uniform dark clothing hid their bodies, and therfore their species. Damn.

He wrenched the person’s arm away while they were distracted, then whirled and made a wild, clawing swipe at their face instead. He must have hit something important, because something very soft gave beneath his seeking fingers and there was a howl of pain.

He did not stop to see the damage -- he rammed the side of his foot into a joint in their leg, shoved them away and stumbled out of their range.

As soon as he was free, another hand snatched at him and the unexpected strength of it sent him staggering. 

“Mean little fucker, aren’t you?” said a voice in his own native language, in morphozic, and Tesla tensed, looking up. That meant...

This one was obviously not the same species as any of the others, because he was head and shoulders taller than the others, towering almost as high as Nnoitra’s horns did -- which put him on the smaller side, for a morphic. His long ears and grotesquely elongated face made it hard to tell what his transformation really was, but Tesla thought it might have been an antelope or a deer or something. 

Then he opened his mouth and his teeth were sharp. 

Probably... Probably  _not_ a deer, then. 

Tesla swallowed past the lump in his throat. 

He knew he still couldn’t afford to transform -- especially now that he'd lost his what food he'd had. It would wipe him out, and his other form wasn’t even going to _fit_ on that shuttle. If he used up what energy he had here -- well, he didn’t think the princess or the mercenary would be friendly enough to help him board the shuttle once he was too exhausted to move under his own power.

Tesla didn’t even have his ice cream anymore.

He ground his teeth, helpless, and let the other morphic manhandle him with both hands. At least they were moving toward the entry of the shuttle, not away. 

How many minutes had it been, anyway? Tesla wondered as he stumbled along, propelled by the huge hands of the man behind him. They must be running out of time by now.

When the entry to the shuttle was fully in view, Tesla realised why they’d grabbed him. Nnoitra, the mercenary, had somehow clobbered, shot, slashed and otherwise murdered his way from the blocked evacuation route to the hangar bay with the princess entirely intact, and even now he’d got between her and her would-be assassins. 

But he was in bad shape. One horn was materially shorter than it had been yesterday. And one of the ‘STATION PERSONNEL ONLY’ signs had at some point been broken and a shard was sticking out of his head. It looked like it had even... possibly... bisected his eye, which was among the more disgusting things Tesla had seen today.

He was still missing one hand, and his face was a mask of dark red mantoid blood, which had gotten into the cracks of his teeth and made his mean smile a whole lot meaner.

 Somewhere, Tesla realised with an uncertain feeling in his belly, the mercenary had lost his gun, and that was what had caused this sudden stand off. He had a knife -- an old fashioned cleaver, roughly the length of Tesla’s own forearm. 

The assailants’ blasters must have been out of charge by now, too, because not one of them was moving.

All of them clearly knew that they could overwhelm the one, very injured, badly-armed mercenary between them and the princess -- they would get hurt doing it, but they could.

And, looking at the single, very injured, badly-armed mercenary between them and the princess, not one of them wanted to be the first to try closing into close quarters. 

Tesla could understand that. What he _couldn’t_ understand was the conclusion they’d evidently jumped to about his relationship with the princess and the mercenary.

“Give her here, and you and your friend can leave without any further -- complications,” the huge probably-not-a-deer morph said in his deep and rumbling voice, shoving him forward. 

“What the fuck,” said Nnoitra, peering at them through a tangled spill of dark hair and what must have been a very obstructive glaze of blood. The jagged piece of plastic sticking out of the other side of his face was even more gruesome up close. 

“You again,” he muttered, scowling thunderously. Tesla had a hot second’s fantasy that he’d decide he was overcome with wild lust and trade the princess for Tesla’s sorry self, but he wasn’t actually surprised when instead he said: “I don’t know this dumbfuck -- kill him, I don’t care. You,” he barked at the princess, “get on the fucking shuttle. I don’t get paid for bringing back a body.”

Princess Inoue stumbled two steps further away from her guard, up the short ramp and into the shuttle, where she hesitated with her silhouette streaming huge and dark upon them all. 

The people surrounding Tesla shifted uncomfortably. 

"Fuck," someone muttered. Tesla wasn't sure who.

“Why else would he be here? You’re bluffing,” said one of them, and pulled out her own knife. She held it up to Tesla’s neck like the threat hadn’t already been clear enough.

Nnoitra laughed. “Go on,” he said, and took one step back of his own. 

Tesla felt the morph holding him tense and coil, ready to spring into action behind him. 

If they made this into a melee, firstly -- and most importantly -- Tesla was going to die immediately, because there was a knife at his neck already. Secondly, all these other people holding him were going to die, because the space station was running out of life support time.

“Wait!” Tesla yelped desperately.

 And then Nnoitra _actually waited_ , so he had to think fast to come up with some reason for him to throw over the princess, and his contract, just to get Tesla off this stinking space station. He cleared his throat. How many minutes had it been? It must have been ten minutes by then. Surely. 

He babbled: “I’m a medic!”

He was. Sort of. He hadn’t exactly finished his qualification but...  he was about ninety eight per cent of a medic, anyway.

Nnoitra’s shoulder twitched. 

Certainly Tesla was the very best medic _currently in attendance._ And maybe Nnoitra would recover from most of those injuries, but that thing sticking out of the mercenary’s face was going to be a serious complication if he didn’t get someone to help soon.

Tesla didn’t know the area of space that well, but he was pretty sure this station was at least hours away from anywhere -- and that was in a proper transport. In a little shuttle like that?

If the mercenary left now with just the princess, he was not likely to get to help soon. 

Nnoitra hesitated. Not, Tesla suspected, because he was that attached to the princess -- he certainly hadn’t seemed like it -- but because he was proud enough to consider dying just to spite everyone else.

“How much do they even pay you for this?” Tesla ground out. 

That made Nnoitra scoff in the back of his throat, and his remaining eye narrowed. 

A second went by, still and silent and very ominous. Tesla’s heart thundered unpleasantly, a heavy and fluttering beat in his neck right where the woman was holding her knife. 

“Fine,” the mercenary snapped. “Girl,” he added, reaching one long arm behind him and grabbing Inoue’s wrist. 

“What?” said Princess Inoue. “You --” she trailed off in a startled noise when she went stumbling down the ramp, propelled by the force of Nnoitra’s push.

 "You can't!" she cried. "Your contact--"

The knife disappeared almost immediately from Tesla’s neck, and he didn’t wait to be given a push to freedom -- he shoved away and ran for it instead. 

He didn’t look back to see whatever was on Princess Inoue’s face when her assassins grabbed her. Frankly, Tesla wasn't concerned. At this point, as long as he was on that shuttle, he didn’t care.

The tall mercenary let him precede him into the shuttle, and then the door hissed closed with a rush of air behind them.

As soon as the entry sealed, the sirens cut off. In the silence Tesla's breathing was very loud.

He sagged against the shuttle wall and closed his eyes.

Even a banged up and tiny shuttle like this one had life support systems in place, so they weren’t going to run out of breathable air or be exposed to space. Although if they were, there was a chance Nnoitra would survive it for a while, anyway. Tesla wouldn’t, of course, but mantoids were practically legendary for the hardiness of their species. 

Tesla cracked his eyes back open and looked him over. His arm was a mess, but that was very secondary to the big piece of plastic sticking right out of his face. His left eye was practically obliterated by it, and he was bleeding like a broken tap in long, dark dribbles.

“Does your ship have any medical supplies?” Tesla asked finally. His voice was so loud in here. His throat hurt a little, too -- heaven only knew what they'd been breathing right at the end there.

Nnoitra gave him a long, steady, suspicious look. The pain, or at least the anxiety over the injury, should have been debilitating, but it was hard to tell from his body language -- and all that blood made his expression hard to read. 

“Probably. I’m gonna get out of here first," he said shortly.

Tesla bit his bottom lip but he nodded. Even with a bleeding head wound, he still had a better idea of how to pilot the shuttle than Tesla did, and lingering would be unwise.

He looked around for any indication that there _was_ a real first aid kit. The inside of the shuttle was cramped at best: a single, arrow-shaped room with a pilot’s seat and a series of strapped-down crates. At some point there’d been room for passenger seats, Tesla thought, because he could see where they’d been fixed to the floor, but they were now missing. 

Not keen on passengers, then. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. 

Nnoitra leaned over the pilot’s seat, like he knew that when he sat down he wasn't getting up again for a while. The engines made a low, full-bellied rumble somewhere beneath Tesla’s feet and the floor vibrated alarmingly. 

He braced himself but it didn’t make the experience of taking off much smoother. His guts still lurched and he nearly toppled. 

When they smoothed out a full two minutes later, Tesla pushed off from the curved metal wall and went poking around the crates and compartments in the shuttle again. The little ship did not seem like something that would be made by, or for, a mantoid like Nnoitra... but Tesla was a lot more familiar with their biology than their culture. He guessed he could have been wrong. 

When he did find the first aid kit, it was cunningly packed away in a part of one of the smooth curved walls of the shuttle. It furthered his suspicion that it had not been made for Nnoitra, because there were things in there that wouldn’t have been good for him -- and other specialised items that Nnoitra could not possibly need. 

Tesla hesitated before interrupting him, because Nnoitra was slumped, leaning on his hands at the console, and seemed hypnotised by the viewscreen -- even though it wasn’t doing very much anymore, just showing their flight path and clear space.

There was still a piece of plastic sticking out of his face, though. He really had to do something about that.

“Excuse me,” Tesla said. And then, when that got nothing: “Nnoitra.” He was trying for ‘polite but firm’ but even to his own ears he just sounded tired. 

If Tesla was tired, Nnoitra must have been ready to drop -- he’d fought through that whole station with the princess. 

Nnoitra jammed his thumb into a button somewhere to the left of the pilot’s seat, grunted, and finally turned back to Tesla. 

All of the careful things Tesla had been preparing to say flew out of his head immediately. That head injury was fucking horrific.

“We’ve got to get that out of your face,” he said instead, gesturing with the first aid kit.

Nnoitra gingerly reached up to touch the piece of debris jutting out of his face. He paused with his fingers about an inch away, clearly hesitating to actually make contact. 

“So you’re a real medic, then?’ he said dubiously. “I don’t need the help,” he added in a hard tone. “I’ve survived worse, and I’ll survive this." His voice went harder still. " _Don't_ bullshit me.”

Tesla took a moment to process that. He knew their species was hardy, had treated a few, even, but... how much ‘worse’ could anything really survive?

He fished his wallet out of his back pocket and showed Nnoitra his ID. It had the green rim that meant he was only supposed to practice under supervision, but Nnoitra wouldn’t know that. Hopefully.

“Lindo-cruz,” he muttered, squinting at it with his good eye - his remaining eye. There would be no saving the left one, Tesla thought.

It was the first time Tesla had heard any hint of an accent from him. He handed it back. “Huh. Guess you are a real medic, after all.”

He sat on a short stack of crates so his face was within Tesla’s standing reach. His horns did not quite scrape the wall when he tipped his head back so Tesla could see the worst of it, but it was a near thing.

He seemed very alien indeed then, even more so than the others of his species Tesla had worked with, skinny and passive but somehow yet threatening. Nnoitra was still under the harsh lights of the shuttle's interior with his head tipped at that awkward angle. For a long moment, the hum of the engines seemed more alive than he did. 

This unsettling stillness and silence didn't last, which was a mixed blessing. For all that he wasn’t actively obstructive, Nnoitra was also not a great patient. When asked to rate his pain on a subjective scale from one to ten, he said it was ‘whatever’, and seemed at best ambivalent about the relevance of pain to therapeutic practice, which Tesla... probably could have predicted. Worse -- he was twitchy. 

Twitchy patients were not a big problem in most circumstances, especially when there was more than one practitioner available for help. But in this case Tesla was all alone with him -- and he had seen first hand how much damage Nnoitra was capable of inflicting on a body. 

And Nnoitra still had his big knife, too, in easy reach with its handle sticking out the top of his long bloodied boots. Tesla doubted he’d need it if he really wanted to do some damage. And so, every time he shifted or twitched away from Tesla’s probing fingers, Tesla paused, acutely aware that one wrong move might end him. 

“Just hurry the fuck up and pull it out,” Nnoitra said, sounding increasingly bored as well as impatient. “If you don’t, I can do it --” 

He reached up, tipping his head toward his careless, seeking fingers and Tesla smacked his hand away sharply. “Don’t!” he hissed, and then froze.  

“Er,” Tesla added, because there was a terrible light in the man’s eye, and quite suddenly the air seemed thick with a staggering potential for violence. Tesla took a breath. He could smell Nnoitra, too, and over the smell of the antiseptics he reeked of rusty blood, of hot metal and raw meat, and the smell made Tesla -- _hungry._

It made Tesla hungry. 

He licked his lips, took a deep breath. Again. 

“Sorry," he said, slowly and carefully. Then he went on: "I didn’t--”

Nnoitra dropped his hand, finally, and cut him off. “You’re scared of me?” He licked his teeth. There was still blood in the grooves between them. Everything stank, even his breath.

“I’m...” Tesla frowned. 

After a beat, Nnoitra’s impassive face cracked into a smile. It was too wide, all teeth, and it shifted the features of his face so that the blood drying black upon his skin cracked in seams. “You’ve got good instincts. What did you say your name was? I forget.”

"Tesla.” Tesla’s pulse raced under his stare. 

“Tesla. Right. But I’m not such a mean guy I’d kill a medic who’s treating me,” Nnoitra drawled.

 Tesla couldn’t help but note that there were a lot of non-fatal injuries not encompassed by that specific assurance. 

“As long as you get the fuck on with it.”

Tesla swallowed. 

“Yes,” he agreed. 

He got on with it. 

Nnoitra’s head wound was his worst injury. It was quick enough to remove the foreign object, and then to make some fairly harsh and grim executive decisions about his ruined eye. But treating it was difficult given the supplies at hand and the severity of the injury -- especially since there were things in the first aid kit that weren’t good for mantoids, including the painkillers and the antibiotics.

It certainly looked a lot less grizzly once Tesla had cleaned and closed and dressed it with a makeshift patch, but that didn’t necessarily make it much less dangerous. Tesla would _really_ have liked to have some antibiotics that could be used on Nnoitra. He’d cleaned the wound out as well as he could, and the dressings had of course been sterile, but heaven only knew what had been on the sign itself before it got embedded in Nnoitra’s face. 

“If it gets infected, it gets infected,” said Nnoitra, sounding just colossally unconcerned about the whole concept. 

“It’s in your face,” Tesla said severely. “An infection would be very dangerous.” This did not seem to make much impact on him. 

The other injuries were relatively easier to treat. His eye was not going to mysteriously return, of course, but Nnoitra seemed very certain that his hand would grow back in days, and given the documented regenerative powers of his species, Tesla had no reason to doubt him. Still, it seemed... basically unbelievable. 

There were bruises and scrapes and a few nasty blaster burns, but once his face and arm had been taken care of Nnoitra scoffed and turned Tesla away. 

“I don’t need to be _coddled_ ,” he snapped. 

Tesla hesitated. He did not consider basic wound care to constitute coddling, but in the end he chose not to push it. If Nnoitra’s face didn’t get infected, or if they fortuitously came upon some compatible broad-spectrum antibiotics, he’d live. 

After the adrenalin and the threat of mortal danger had drained away, and after he’d finished shakily patching Nnoitra up as much as he was allowed, Tesla sat on the floor where once the shuttle's seats would have been bolted and propped his back against one cold curved wall. He was tired -- and not just tired, but truly depleted. He hadn’t even finished breakfast, he remembered wearily. 

He could clearly recall the fate of his ice cream, too warm from being tucked under his arm next to the heat of his body, leaking across the hangar bay’s metal floor. He was too tired to feel more than a pang of irritation at the injustice of it all.  

Nnoitra was a mantoid, which meant that he could go days without eating and not suffer much. There might not even be any food on his ship. Except... that first aid kit hadn’t been designed for members of Nnoitra’s species, that was for sure. Which meant... maybe...  

Tesla spent the next sixteen and a half minutes feeling the chill of the metal at his back slowly recede as it leeched his body heat and contemplating if it would be weird to search the kit for food. Plenty of species out there needed to maintain certain balances of starches to live, which meant there might be something in there with some calories...

Probably weird. He glanced sideways at Nnoitra, who was messing with coordinates and scowling fiercely at a series of gauges on the viewscreen. He looked back a few times while he was thinking about it, but Nnoitra continued to ignore him as though he was a piece of furniture.  

At twenty minutes, Tesla felt the burn of frustrated tears building up behind his eyes, and realised that unless he got some kind of food energy he was about to have a meltdown like an overtired toddler -- and after that point, his hunger would peak and become seriously dangerous.

Tesla crawled three paces back to the first aid kit and yanked the top of it open again. He pawed through it, spilling a roll of bandages and a heat pack and a syringe of something black out in his haste. 

Finally, at the bottom of what seemed like the biggest and the most useless medical kit in the galaxy, Tesla found a package of ten little gel tubes. His eager hands had started to tremble, and they shook too hard to open them. In the end he ripped the first open with his teeth. 

Someone had gone to the effort of trying to make the gel inside taste like fruit, but it was so sweet it made Tesla’s mouth want to curl up in protest. He pulled out another anyway. And another. His fingers were slippery. 

“Hey. What the... Hey!" Nnoitra’s voice interjected abruptly, “Are you fucking _crying_ into the glucose?"

Tesla froze. 

It wasn’t that he’d _forgotten_ about Nnoitra, exactly. It was just that he hadn’t seemed very important for the last five minutes there. 

He swallowed -- sweet, sickly sweet, coating his tongue and his molars like disgusting paste -- and looked down at his sticky fingers and the discarded wrappers littering the ships floor between his knees. He was not crying, but he was definitely getting kind of red-eyed and he could feel a tear hovering on the edge of his eyelashes, suspended there and trembling when he blinked. 

“I’m not,” he began. Then he stopped because he realised that his fingers were sticky and that meant that there was food on them, so he put them in his mouth and -- 

Nnoitra booted him in the thigh, hard enough that it would probably bruise. “I'm talking to you,” he prompted.

Tesla grunted deep in his throat at the impact. He turned and looked up at him.

From his spot kneeling upon the floor, Nnoitra’s long, wiry body seemed very long indeed. Tesla was suddenly reminded, powerfully, of that early fantasy he’d had, what seemed like ages ago now -- of feeling this man’s long, lean-muscled thighs clench on either side of his skull while he sucked his cock. 

The injuries and bandages did not detract from the feeling in the slightest. Nor did the dirt and grime. The exhaustion barely dampened it.  

He licked his lips. If he was well enough to be horny, the vile-tasting gel was working. They were meant for people with severe sugar imbalances, probably, but they obviously worked for starving morphics in a pinch. 

Honestly, there was not a lot of organic matter that wouldn’t work for Tesla in a pinch. If he got hungry enough, Nnoitra would probably look increasingly appealing -- not as a sexual partner, but as a _snack food._

“I need, uh, food,” he said, licking his thumb.

“That shit’s poisonous,” Nnoitra said dubiously, eyeing the wrappers.

“Not to me.” Tesla bypassed any effort to explain the value of glucose gel to an obligate carnivore who couldn’t even taste sugar. Nnoitra’s species got all of their nutrients from flesh, and Tesla was distantly aware that a couple of tubes of the gel would total his liver. “I”m hungry,” he added lamely. 

Nnoitra stared at him blankly for a second, and then he grunted. “There’s no food on the shuttle,” he said, which was about what Tesla had expected. Nnoitra could go days and days on nothing but fluids. “But I didn’t get to refuel before I left... so I need to find somewhere close to put in anyway. Are you going to eat ...all of that?” 

“Probably,” Tesla said. ‘Probably’ was a word which in this case meant ‘absolutely’.

“That’s disgusting,” Nnoitra said, in a tone of unwilling fascination. 

Tesla hunched over his remaining gel tubes.

“I need it,” he growled unhappily. 

Nnoitra glowered down at him for a second and then made a scoffing noise in his throat. “Whatever.” 

He turned back to the console, electing not to look at Tesla or the mess of wrappers. “Batard Military Base is nearby -- seven hours, maybe. You can get off there.”

“Right,” Tesla agreed coldly. “I’ll do that.”

He took the other tubes from the first aid kit -- as well as a tube of something that was probably meant to be a lubricant of some kind. The ingredients marked it as edible for Tesla, so he shoved it in his pocket for later. He wasn’t sure what would happen when they got to the military base, but maybe e could get a ride out to somewhere else... 

Nnoitra must have finished whatever manual piloting was required because a few minutes later their flight smoothed out and he commenced messing around with the radio receiver. 

Tesla curled up around his stash of disgusting emergency foods and quietly felt... kind of equally gross, if he was honest. He didn’t like having someone he was attracted to act like he was completely repulsive. No, it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to Tesla today -- not by a long shot -- but it was the thing his brain elected to fixate on in the moment. He probably wasn’t actually ready to contemplate what had happened back on the space station just yet... 

But Nnoitra said he was disgusting. Being tired and hungry and upset made it a lot harder to have thick skin. 

There was a news broadcast about the station, though. And another. Nnoitra tended to turn the volume of transmissions right down between them -- not a fan of pop music, Tesla decided -- but he always put the news casts on at a higher volume. 

‘Royal family missing’, ‘space station rendered uninhabitable’, ‘security failure’, ‘reports still incoming from survivors’.... 

“Nnoitra,” said Tesla after the fourth broadcast -- which meant two hours had passed in silence and faintly drifting pop music, and he could suck down another carefully rationed gel package in a moment. 

“What,” he said flatly, turning his face away from the viewscreen and back to face Tesla’s hunched body. He had to turn a lot, now, to put Tesla in the sight line of his remaining eye. It was still an unearthly violet, glossy in the angular set of his face. The injuries had not managed to make him ugly to Tesla. 

Tesla reflected that possibly Nnoitra wasn’t having a great day, either. He had, after all, lost his eye. And his contract. 

“If you’d taken Princess Inoue instead...” he paused, licking his lips, trying to find the words. The man was prickly, and clearly prone to violence, so Tesla had to be careful.

“I couldn’t have,” Nnoitra cut him off without bothering to wait for him to finish constructing the question. 

“What?” Tesla blinked. 

Nnoitra made an irritated noise in his throat. He pushed a fall of dark hair away from his bandaged eye and hooked it over one of his horns to keep it out of the way. 

“I didn’t have my gun -- piece of shit jammed up,” he explained, apparently unwilling to consider how using it as a bludgeon may have contributed to that particular problem. “I had a knife. They were mostly out of blaster charge, yeah, but if I’d tried to take all of them and keep that dumb bitch alive, all at once, I’d never have gotten off the station before the life support systems all failed.”

“Oh.” _Dumb bitch_ , Tesla supposed, was code for, _her highness, my client_.

“Different thing if I’d fought them one on one,” he said, “but cowards like that always fight in groups.”

“That’s...”

“What?” Nnoitra’s mouth curled in another too-broad, unfriendly smile. Tesla wasn’t sure he had any other kind of smile. It made things low in Tesla’s belly go inappropriately warm and squirmy. 

“Did you think I threw the job for the opportunity to rescue you?” Nnoitra's voice was teasing but it had a mean, hard edge. “How conceited.”

And, well, no, of course Tesla hadn’t thought that -- not exactly -- but... well. Nnoitra’s decision made a lot more sense now. “Not really.”

Now Nnoitra was looking at him, really looking, and ignoring even the radio which had returned to playing catchy pop music and commercials. 

"You're..." he was silent for a long second, and Tesla used it to fill in the possible ends of that sentence, none of which were very good ones. 

The many embarrassing things he'd done in front of Nnoitra were at the forefront of his mind and he glanced away, taking in the view from the porthole across from them instead. Blackness and stars, none of which looked like they were really moving. It was an illusion, of course -- they were going very fast. But the stars were very distant.

He was... _what_? Obnoxious? Ridiculous? An embarrassment? Disgusting? 

"... strange," Nnoitra said finally. "You're a weird guy, Tesla." 

Tesla twitched. Ah. Well. That was...

Nnoitra surged out of his seat so fast Tesla didn’t have time to do much but twitch. There was, very suddenly, a hand in his hair. That was the trouble with people who had more than two -- you could never keep an eye on all of them at once.

It pulled, inexorably, and Tesla stumbled up to his feet, spilling tiny glucose gel packages from his lap as he went. 

Nnoitra was way, way taller than him, and even when he stood at his full height the other man loomed, casting him in shadow where the overhead lights couldn’t reach.

"Uh... Nnoitra?" 

"Yeah... You're pretty familiar with my name," Nnoitra told him directly, stepping in -- and in -- and backing him into the wall of the craft. It was cold through his clothes.

His hand in Tesla's hair went tight, and it pulled at his scalp roughly. Somehow that tug communicated itself right down his spine. Tesla swallowed. 

"So... you want to fuck me," Nnoitra said plainly. “Don't lie," he added, sneering, "I've seen you -- you've been staring pathetically at me for days.”

...oh. 

Tesla flushed. 

That seemed to be answer enough -- Nnoitra laughed at him then grinned, wide, fast and sharp, stretching his face into strange new proportions. His mouth opened wider than Tesla's. His teeth were long and flat. 

"Yeah, I thought that was it. You're easy, aren't you?"

He was holding Tesla's head so securely he couldn't resist without ripping out some hair, and if he was honest he didn’t really want to resist that much anyway.

  Tesla followed the pull of his hand, let it stretch out his neck and tip his head back until his eyes watered with the sting of his grip.

“Well?” Nnoitra demanded. 

“Yes,” said Tesla, sharply and immediately, although he couldn’t remember what he was agreeing to.

Nnoitra shoved him to the floor with very little in the way of grace or gentleness, and Tesla could feel where there would be bruises blooming later. He looked up at Nnoitra’s lean, looming body and felt a heart-thundering mix of fear and anticipation. 

His boots thumped, bloody three inch heels on either side of Tesla's body, and then he dropped to his knees right over him. 

Nnoitra held him down -- he was spindly, but he was also impossibly strong. Tesla only resisted a little, and only because he wanted to feel his strong hands dig in and force him back down.

His third hand dug a sealed sachet of lubricant from his boot -- tucked, Tesla realised as his mouth went completely dry, right next to his knife. The sachet made a soft _whap_ in landing on Tesla's belly, and his eyes were drawn to it automatically -- at least until Nnoitra put one of his hands on Tesla's dick, tracing the shape of it through his trousers. 

He planted one hand over Tesla's collarbone like he actually needed to hold him down, fingers long and threatening and digging into the soft parts of his throat just above. With his free hands he yanked at Tesla's clothes, scrambling now. 

Somewhere a button popped. Tesla ignored it. Nnoitra's single eye was shadowed and intent. 

"Mm," Nnoitra said once he'd peeled Tesla's trousers away and exposed his cock to the recycled air of the ship. 

Tesla glanced down between them and tried for a second to see whatever made Nnoitra make that soft hungry little noise. His cock was rapidly becoming hard, thick and swollen, flushed darkly in the shadow between their bodies.

"Nice," he purred. His voice was all low and throaty, and he threaded the fingers of one hand through the dark blond coils of his pubic hair. The gentle tug of it made Tesla shiver. 

He snapped up the packet on Tesla's belly and ripped it open without ever letting him up or relaxing the pressure of his hand. Something slippery -- hopefully it _was_ actually lube -- dripped down his fingers, and then Nnoitra took it and dragged it over the head of his cock. It was cool, but slick and wet, and he was already so sensitive.

Tesla let his head hit the floor with a thump. He shuddered when Nnoitra's long, strong fingers slid his foreskin back fully, exposing the whole of his glans. 

"Oh, that's good," Tesla said. His voice came out breathy. His face felt hot. He was probably an unflattering shade of red, but it didn't seem to be bothering Nnoitra much. 

"Your cock's so fucking _thick_ ," said Nnoitra, which wasn't really a response, but he seemed to be addressing Tesla's penis more than his actual person, so maybe it wasn't meant to be. He sounded delighted.

Nnoitra rubbed his slippery hand over the thick vein on the underside of his cock, wrapped his fingers around firmly and drew up with a long, slick noise. 

Tesla let his eyes flutter closed and rolled his hips into the touch -- until Nnoitra shoved him down with another hand on the bend of his hip. He strained against the grip, shifted futilely under the overwhelming strength of his hands. 

"Stop squirming," Nnoitra ordered, which was all the warning he got before he crawled further up Tesla's body and slid the wet, aching head of his cock against his sphincter. 

He had half a second to brace himself before Nnoitra shoved -- and he did have to shove, because Nnoitra's body was tight and Tesla's cock _was_ thick -- and his muscles opened up, with effort, to accept the intrusion of Tesla's cock.

He stilled for a second, and Tesla grunted and rocked up into him helplessly. 

"Shit!" Nnoitra yelped. "Fuck. Don't move," he demanded, which was -- almost impossible. Tesla wanted to grab his waist and his hips -- he was so skinny Tesla was pretty sure his hands would meet around Nnoitra's waist -- and use all his primed, craving muscles to grind up into him. He wanted to flip them and crush Nnoitra to his chest and fuck him until his muscles shook. He breathed hard and closed his eyes and tried not to... do any of that.

"Mmnh," said Nnoitra, who was flushed across his high cheekbones -- the colour of his other sensory organs there seemed pale in comparison -- and watching Tesla with his one glazed eye shadowed beneath a spill of inky hair.

Tesla felt the muscles in Nnoitra's thighs flex when he rose up a little, experimentally, and the long slow drag of it made him squeeze his eyes shut again. Gravity helped him on the way down. It felt good, a kind of sharp pleasure that washed away Tesla's breath and made him moan between his teeth. 

The next time he rolled his hips Tesla met him halfway, and it felt -- he felt it clean up his spine, hot and beautiful and melting.

Nnoitra made a little noise in his throat. He stopped moving. 

A long-fingered hand slid up over his throat. Tesla twitched and opened his eyes.

Nnoitra's face was right above his, and his long dark hair threw them both into intimate shadows. His voice was a breath on Tesla's mouth and his chin when he spoke, and Tesla's skin shivered pleasantly in its wake. 

"I think I told you not to move," he said, smiling, and the pressure of his hand on Tesla's throat grew stronger. 

"Oh," said Tesla, staring at his mouth. His lip was wet and shining. 

Nnoitra's hand on Tesla's throat squeezed. It was the grip of a person who'd choked someone to death before, and who wouldn't mind much if he did it again. It wasn't gentle -- it was hard and it was expert, and Tesla couldn't breathe through the pressure. 

He strained with his arms, but they, too were held fast, one by a hand and the other by Nnoitra's weight leaning on the forearm ending in his bandaged hand -- and Nnoitra still had one spare hand, and it was creeping up Tesla's chest between them while he was stuffed with Tesla's cock. 

Tesla swallowed. His throat strained against Nnoitra's broad strong hand with the movement. His pulse thumped beneath his fingers.

He shivered, hard, and relaxed. 

"That's it," Nnoitra agreed, staring down at him with his one dark eye. "Stay just like that."

His spare hand slid up Tesla's chest, over his chin, and dipped one long finger between his lips.

The pad of his finger rubbed Tesla's bottom lip, and then Nnoitra leaned down -- a sudden weight upon Tesla's throat, heavy and suffocating, and he stayed there until Tesla's head ached with the pressure of it and his vision went dark and star-studded just like the void outside.

Nnoitra licked Tesla's lips.

He held him there for a few seconds longer, watching him struggle -- and struggle, then, not to struggle -- and then when he finally let up on Tesla's throat the sudden rush of breath left him dizzy and giddy.

Nnoitra licked the inside of his mouth even as Tesla gasped for breath. 

When he drew back the movement shifted him on Tesla's dick and he groaned, loudly, helplessly -- _shit_ \--

"Don't fucking move," Nnoitra repeated, tracing over his Adam's apple with one long finger. 

Tesla's chest heaved. "I won't," he rasped.

  "Mmm," said Nnoitra, in what Tesla thought might have been approval. 

Nnoitra took a deep breath, rocked his hips -- up, down, until he found a rhythm that made his breath hitch and his muscles all jump every time he ground down, until Tesla strained to stay still. 

He rolled his head back and moaned, "Fuck, yes, Tesla," in the most shameless and luxurious way. 

The sound of it hit Tesla somewhere deep and visceral, some place where he kept all his instincts, and he felt hot from head to toe.

Nnoitra was not gentle, despite his injuries. His eye was cacked just barely open. His face was flushed, right across the bridge of his nose. His mouth was glossy and wet.

“Good,” he growled, low in his throat, unself-conscious, and he let go of one of Tesla’s arms to reach between them and touch his own cock. 

Tesla watched him with a kind of dizzy rapture, helpless to do anything else under the iron command of _don’t fucking move_. His heart swelled with a heavy beating and he tried desperately not to shove his own hips back into Nnoitra’s body. Above him, Nnoitra panted and sweated with the merciless pursuit of his own pleasure.

Nnoitra was loud, too, loud and shameless, and he dug his nails into Tesla’s chest and scraped them over his stomach even as he got ever louder, breath coming harder, until he was making thrilled little sounds with every rock of his hips, eye closed, head tipped back --

He came with a full body shudder that Tesla felt clean up his spine, and a loud, breathless scream.

After a few panting seconds he dragged his fingers through the mess of semen on Tesla’s belly, which stung in the scratches he’d made, and licked his lips. "Mmm."

His hand came back around Tesla’s wrist, then, overpowering and heavy like steel.

"Come on," he purred, and he smiled a slow, lazy smile and rocked up and back and ground down upon Tesla’s cock until he came, helpless to even move beneath him. 

And then Nnoitra crawled off him and slumped back against the wall, loose and relaxed for the first time that Tesla had seen. He watched Tesla with his one hooded eye. 

"That was good," he said finally. He seemed... unflatteringly surprised. 

"Yeah," said Tesla, even as he rubbed his throat -- he could already imagine the ring of bruises he'd have in a few hours -- "It was."

And Nnoitra was just... there, shamelessly naked, with his long body slouched back against the curved wall of the ship, one arm braced against a bent knee, one wrapped around it, two braced against the floor. 

Tesla could see his cock laying soft against one lean-muscled thigh. 

It was really not Tesla’s fault that he’d been thinking about Nnoitra’s cock all week. 

"What," said Nnoitra, giving Tesla a suspicious look. "What the fuck are you looking at?"

"I want to suck your dick," Tesla blurted.

There was a pause. Tesla felt his face get hot again, but then -- he'd helped clean one ruined eye from its socket, and he'd fucked the man to a screaming orgasm three minutes ago, so how much room for embarrassment did he really have left?

"Yeah, okay," Nnoitra said finally, eyeing Tesla over his hand. "Give me five minutes."

Tesla gave him five minutes, counting them down in his head like he was on a timer, and the second they were up he crawled to him and set himself between Nnoitra's legs. 

Nnoitra did not push him away or tell him to wait longer. Short refractory period, Tesla thought happily, almost giddily, and buried his face between his thighs.

He smelled of Tesla's semen and alien sweat and the indefinable strange smell of his body, sharp and salty in the ship's homogenised recycled air. Tesla took his thigh in one hand and found him cooler to touch than he'd expected -- even five minutes away from Tesla's warmer body was enough to let him cool. 

Nnoitra shivered under the touch of his hand, which must have felt terribly warm to him.

His skin was at its softest on the insides of his thighs, on his testicles and his penis, and Tesla mouthed and licked and let him feel, ever so gently, the hard edge of a careful bite on the inside of his thigh. That last -- the scrape of his teeth and the pressure, and maybe just the quiet threat of it -- made Nnoitra's breath change. Tesla could feel the muscles in his belly twitch, but more tellingly he could see that it made his cock go hard and swollen very quickly. 

He leaned forward and he let the fat head of Nnoitra's cock rest against his mouth for a second. The skin was damp and so, so soft, like warm muscled velvet against his lips.

He opened his mouth and breathed and felt Nnoitra twitch.

"Tesla," Nnoitra growled. "If you're just gonna fucking--" He cut off with a breath when Tesla licked his lips wet and covered his teeth, so gentle, so careful, and sucked the tip of his cock between his lips. 

"Oh." There was a soft exhale and then a long slow noise of pleasure and satisfaction. "Oh fuck."

There was a wet, slick sound, and then the quiet sound of Nnoitra's heavy breathing and the sloppy slide of Tesla's tongue along the underside of Nnoitra's cock.

Tesla dropped forward, tasting the salty heat of him, rubbing his tongue along the silky smooth, slick skin of his cock. It was a heavy and strange weight in his mouth.

  He went slowly, carefully -- Tesla wasn't completely confident in his gag reflex, but he was willing to test it. He squeezed one hand on Nnoitra's thigh, feeling the muscles tense beneath his fingers, and exhaled carefully through his nose. 

Tesla didn't even flinch when three of Nnoitra's hands twisted in his hair, yanking at his scalp and pulling him forward. The head of Nnoitra's cock rubbed along the roof of his mouth and pushed into the soft parts at the back.

He pulled back enough to inhale, breathless, and exhale, hard, against Nnoitra's cock. Then he made a long soft moan of his own when he slid it back into his mouth as far as he could go before it felt like maybe he shouldn't, like maybe he wouldn't be able to breathe -- and then he pushed further, until his eyes watered and his heart raced, until his nose was pressed into the dark wiry hair at the base of Nnoitra's cock. 

That was when Nnoitra clenched his hands and rolled his hips and groaned loudly. So Tesla did it again, and then again, long and slow and messy until he was lightheaded and his face was wet with saliva and involuntary tears.

He hooked one of Nnoitra's knees over his shoulder and threw himself into it, until Nnoitra's loud shameless moans turned desperate and rose to a howl and his heel slammed carelessly into Tesla's back -- and then Nnoitra's chest heaved and his long strong thighs pressed in against Tesla's skull and his fingers tightened in Tesla's hair until it felt like he was going to tear a chunk out. 

Tesla barely tasted it at first when Nnoitra came, although he could feel it -- and he could certainly feel the abortive twitching and shaking of the man's hands and legs, and hear the way his voice caught hard, a moan on every exhale. He drew back slowly as much for his own sake as for Nnoitra's, and that was when he could taste it, finally, semen sitting hot and bitter on his tongue.

"Oh," said Nnoitra slowly, on a gasp. Then, "Fuck." 

Then, after a second: " _Shit,_ " he added, and made exactly no motion to top staring at the roof of his ship. His chest was still heaving, rising and falling with each hard breath.

Tesla sat back. Nnoitra was slumped further down the wall, sprawled out with only his shoulders braced against it now. His legs were flung out and Tesla could see the involuntary twitch of muscles in his stomach. His face was -- blank, really, mouth slack, eye unfocused with its pupil blown huge. 

His bandages hadn't come loose yet, which seemed like a minor miracle.

"Mmm," Tesla agreed. His voice came out gravelly. For once, the real thing had eclipsed the fantasy of it. "We could do that again sometime," he offered, eyeing him. "If you wanted."

"Mm-hm," said Nnoitra vaguely, which was the most agreeable thing Tesla had ever heard from him.

They were both quiet for a while again after. Tesla's throat ached and his mouth tasted disgusting and he could feel bruises setting in on his back where he had hit the floor, but all of that was distant for the moment, lost in the buzzing, chemical satisfaction of a really good orgasm. 

There was still blood flaking off his boots where he'd trodden in it, and he scratched idly at the mess without really thinking about who it came from. 

A few long minutes of companionable silence passed with only the sounds of Tesla scarfing down another tube of emergency sugar to break the soft hum of the radio.

  And then another news cast came on: 

“More details have been uncovered in the investigation of the disappearance of the royal family. Footage has been recovered from the hangar bay from just moments before the atmospherics failed. Investigators now believe that it’s possible members of her highness’s security detail acted in collusion with her assassins --”

“The fuck?” Nnoitra jerked right up from his lazy and sated sprawl, briefly drowning out the reporter’s unflattering but remarkably accurate description of--

Well. Of Nnoitra. He was describing Nnoitra. 

The next thirty seconds were taken up by a new voice -- educated, female, and explaining with utmost sincerity that, being part of the security company and responsible by association, she would do her _utmost_ to assist regular authorities in bringing the perpetrators -- here, Tesla realised with dawning anxiety, meaning Nnoitra. 

And then it was back to the newscaster again, a pleasant and steady drone that did not match the queasy feeling in Tesla's guts: “Authorities are also looking for another individual for questioning in reference to the case. He’s described as a human male, five foot ten or thereabouts, blond, approximately seventy kilograms. His image has been provided on our website--”

“I wonder who that is," Tesla said, sounding sort of distant even to himself. No afterglow, however satisfying, was going to buoy him through this announcement.

He couldn’t think of anyone he’d seen who looked like that. Five foot ten was almost as short as Tesla himself. None of the assailants back on the space station had been that short, and most human men were taller than that anyway...

"Are you fucking kidding me,” said Nnoitra. 

Tesla turned his head and blinked at him. 

"It’s _you_ , you incredible fucking idiot.”

“It’s me?” Tesla squawked. “But I’m -- I’m not--” 

“If they looked at that footage, I bet you seemed plenty involved,” Nnoitra said savagely.

It wasn’t the first time someone had mistaken Tesla for human. His hair hid the ridge of bone that jutted from his skull, and, unlike Nnoitra, there were very few obvious external differences -- enough that even Nnoitra, who he’d had sex with, couldn’t easily tell. Humans were a harmless, friendly species known chiefly for being able to adapt to almost any environment, so they were pretty ubiquitous. It was an easy mistake to make.

Tesla frowned. “Oh.”

That... made a bit more sense. And if there was footage... it would show Nnoitra apparently giving up the princess just to be allowed to leave with Tesla -- and then the footage probably also included whatever the assassins had done with her after Tesla had boarded and stopped looking back. 

“Fuck,” said Nnoitra again, putting down his tablet with a _bang_. “They have the fucking shuttle rego on their site.”

"But..." Tesla frowned. “How could they possibly...”

“ _Nelliel,_ ” spat Nnoitra. “That fucking bitch. If she had half the brains of a goddamn Truscitulan slime, she’d have known there was no way to get that woman out of there alive." 

“That’s going to make getting fuel at the military base difficult, isn’t it?” Tesla said quietly. He wondered what ‘wanted for questioning’ would mean, and if he’d get out of this mess unscathed. 

His head gave another warning pang and he reflected that all the exertion of sex had perhaps been ill advised. After a second he gave in and pulled he pack of oil from beneath his shirt where it lay discarded upon the floor. He checked the ingredients again. Definitely edible. 

He ripped it open and drank it, ignoring the foul taste. It coated his mouth in a particularly disgusting way. 

“Fucking -- _yes,_ obviously. But we still need to refuel,” Nnoitra said, tossing his tablet at the wall. 

Tesla plucked it out of the air before it could break on the metal wall of the shuttle. Nnoitra continued without interruption, gesturing wildly with his bandages hand.

“And there’s nowhere else close e-- _Are you eating the lube_?”

“...No,” said Tesla sullenly, licking the oil off his lower lip. A 50g package was nearly 400 kilocalories, which would carry him through to... 

Tesla would still be ravenous in another hour or two, and after that it might start becoming dangerous. He scrubbed his hands over his face. 

“Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m hungry,” snarled Tesla. He looked at the clock on Nnoitra’s tablet, which was synchronised with the ship's. “We still have to stop at the base?”

“Unless I hold up another shuttle for fuel,” Nnoitra said in a considering tone. “Could take longer... but there’s no guarantee one will come this way anyway. Fuck. I’ve gotta get out of Bredtopia-controlled space.”

That was probably true, too. People really loved the Princess Inoue, and if footage of her last moments had ended up on the public-access internet, well... Mantoids weren’t very common, and even among them Nnoitra was very recognisable.

Nnoitra was giving Tesla a calculating look. “When we get there, you’re going to be a hostage.”

“They might not think I’m worth it, since they think I’m involved, too,” Tesla pointed out. 

“We’re gonna find that out,” said Nnoitra. 

There was a heartbeat's silence as Tesla absorbed that, and then Nnoitra added: "You don't _mind_ , do you, Tesla?" It would have been hard to interpret that as anything but the particularly passive-aggressive trap it was: Nnoitra was smiling again, one of those hard mean smiles that were all teeth, and his tone brooked no argument.

Tesla didn’t agree to the proposition, but he also wasn't about to argue. It was imperative that he got off the shuttle soon anyway. There was no more food on it, not even gross semi-food substitutes anymore. He would need to eat, and even if they both got arrested at least he’d probably get food.

Instead of arguing about it, Tesla stayed quiet. He began to feel less and less good as the hormone buzz of good but probably stupid sex drained off, and then he crawled back into his shirt and did up his trousers because the shuttle seemed colder now that he wasn’t exerting himself.

He tipped his head back against the curved wall of the ship and silently watched Nnoitra, who methodically went through the crates until he’d amassed an impressive assortment of weapons. 

Nnoitra strapped all of them to his lean-muscled, rangy body without bothering to actually put his clothes back on until it was obstructive to leave them off. Tesla chewed his bottom lip and wondered with some despair when he'd stop finding Nnoitra attractive. In the back of his mind he'd hoped that his interest would be extinguished once he'd fucked him.

Instead Tesla watched him check his knife and slide it back down the side of one long boot, and he thought, _oh no_. 

It did not seem to be going away, and Tesla was suddenly sure -- with the kind of horrified, split-second certainty of a man who had missed a step and knew he was about to fall, and that the landing would not be gentle -- that he was going to continue to make stupid decisions based on that feeling. 

They flew on in silence and Tesla quietly wondered what being held hostage was going to feel like. 

Batard Military Base was on an iron red planet whose pull Tesla could feel dragging at their ship as soon as they entered orbit. From what Nnoitra’s tablet told him -- he’d been flicking through to distract himself from both the nagging throb of hunger, and the strange, backwards strip show going on three feet away -- it was more or less uninhabited except for the small base. 

It wasn’t a very easy place to survive, although it was in a strategically interesting part of space. The base, as far as Tesla read, was therefore mostly staffed by aliens who could adapt to the terrain and air quality, provided they were rotated through off and on. 

Reading between the lines, Tesla guessed that meant both that it was a small base and that there weren’t that many personnel there on a day to day basis. 

That could work in their favour, if Nnoitra really did intend to try holding him hostage.

When they finally lost speed and settled into orbit, the planet was visible through the view ports: a huge rusty red curve from space, pitted and patched, but peaceful.

Of course, neither Tesla nor Nnoitra considered that the shuttle rego and description would be sufficient for the base personnel to recognise them from orbit -- so it was an unpleasant surprise when they opened fire without asking questions. 

The whole shuttle rocked and slewed to one side, and for a moment Tesla didn't know what was happening. 

The wall behind him shook dramatically and Nnoitra’s sudden blistering curses got drowned out by a _crack_ that Tesla felt more than he heard, vibrating along the ship right beneath them. 

“What’s happening?” He shot to his feet. 

In hindsight that was probably a poor decision -- the shuttle shuddered violently and he fell back against the curve metal wall, fingers scrambling for purchase on its smooth sleek surface. 

“ _Stay down,_ ” barked Nnoitra, without looking back to him. 

“Nnoitra Gilga, you are wanted to answer charges under authority of the crown,” said a low, pleasant voice over the radio, “On the condition of your immediate surrender into custody, Batard Military Base will provide an escort for your safe landing.”

Oh.

That was what was happening.

“Oh,” said Tesla, numb. He looked over at Nnoitra. What he could see of his face was contorted into a fierce and ugly expression, lit in harsh lines by the glow of the viewscreen. 

Tesla’s stomach knotted up at that expression. This was an entire military base, and it seemed unfathomable that he'd go forward with his insane plan, but --

But Nnoitra slapped a button on his console. 

"Does the authority of the crown extend to protecting your own subjects?" He challenged. "Got a civilian on board right here. You gonna shoot him down, too? Burn him right up along with me?"

He lifted his finger off ths button and leaned back into the pilot's seat. Tesla could see he favoured his left side, but he didn't seem to pay it much attention.

Nnoitra licked his teeth.

There was long pause. Nnoitra spent the duration tapping his fingers and messing with something that made alerts flash rapidly across the view screen, piling on top of one another in angry red illumination. 

Finally, he made a noise of disgust and tipped his head back in Tesla's direction. “This piece of shit’s not going anywhere but down -- which is probably why they took that shot to start with, fuckers. I’m going to have to land it either way."

Tesla could feel his stomach trying to crawl out his throat.

“Okay...” he said slowly. What that would mean for them here, he wasn't sure, but he didn't feel that it was really the moment to ask. 

Finally the radio’s receiving signal flashed again. 

“The human flying with you has been identified as a probable colluder in the attack on Princess Inoue and deemed an acceptable casualty. Surrender yourself and your craft and we will escort you down. This is your final opportunity.”

“You're a shitty hostage,” said Nnoitra to Tesla, who was still trying to process being considered ‘an acceptable casualty’.

He hadn't had a huge amount of faith in Bredtopia's military to begin with, but he still felt -- aside from the acute anxiety clogging his throat -- subtly offended by the idea. 

“I... guess it’s our only option then,” Tesla said, feeling ill. He didn’t think that this new queasiness was hunger alone.

Tesla did not want to be helpless in the custody of a bunch of people who didn’t care if he died during arrest, but he couldn’t see how they could possibly back out of this one... 

“Yeah,” said Nnoitra, which seemed to confirm Tesla's thoughts. 

Then he reached over and turned the radio off completely.

Tesla blinked. 

“Brace yourself.”

“Bra--” The shuttle lurched and Tesla hit the floor before he could even finish asking what that meant. 

There was a blinding light outside the view port and a sudden enormous gravity that made his stomach twist. Then a sharp, hideous weightlessness came upon them. Something in the belly of the shuttle made a grotesque and ominous _crunch_. 

This was not, Tesla thought in a blind panic, a nice quiet surrender.

They _plummeted_. 

Tesla could hear metal screaming, atmosphere screaming, _himself_ screaming. The roof the shuttle flew toward him and, unlike the crates, Tesla was not strapped securely down. He screamed as he hit it, and then the pressure of the ship’s uncontrolled descent stole all his breath. 

Distantly, behind his own terror, Tesla heard Nnoitra give a wild defiant whoop and --

He did not remember the impact of landing -- just the squeal of tortured metal and the roar of dampeners kicking in much, much too late, and then -- then just that he was on the floor, shaking and aching.

He then rolled over because his guts were heaving. His ribs burned with a huge, spiky ache, and it did not get any better when he vomited all over the floor. 

“Ugh,” he said. Then, "Ugh?"

 _What the fuck?_ went Tesla's brain, and then it seemed to get stuck: _what the fuck, what the fuck, what the f u c k w h--_

“Oh, you’re still alive,” said Nnoitra, as though he was surprised but not unhappy with that development. 

Tesla saw his long, heeled boot move from the corner of his eye and cringed, but when the kick came it was to his thigh, not to his ribs, and it wasn’t particularly hard.  

“You’d better get up.” 

Tesla wasn’t even sure if he could _roll over_. Getting up seemed... ambitious. “... Unh?” he got out.  

“‘Cause in a minute we’ll be surrounded -- and I’ve had enough of bodyguarding to _last me a fuckin’ lifetime_.” 

Outside, someone demanded their surrender in a deep, booming voice over some kind of speaker somewhere -- a megaphone, or a public address, something.  

Where were they? Where had they landed? What was... Tesla blinked dizzily and then, with the distorted screech of protesting metal, the far wall of the shuttle collapsed entirely.  

Nnoitra raised his gun-arm, supporting his latest weapon across the bandaged forearm of his damaged hand, and fired immediately outside. 

“Seriously,” he said, “get the hell up if you wanna live.”  

And then he was moving, out into a mess of rubble and dust and, after a moment, yelling.  

Tesla made it to his knees and wiped over his mouth with his hand. The smells of hot metal and crumbling rock and plasters just made him more nauseous, and the smell of bile wasn’t helping.  

“Don’t move,” yelled a voice, and Tesla froze.  

This man -- human, or at least something that looked pretty human -- was halfway into the shuttle via the collapsed side. Tesla couldn’t see a face beneath his big dark helmet, but the uniform was of the royal military and his blaster was trained on Tesla, nice and steady.  

“Yeah,” said Tesla, and did not move. 

The blaster's end didn’t move, but the soldier touched something around his collar and murmured something into a communications unit.  

Outside someone called, “Your accomplice has been captured! Lay down your--” and was cut off in a squeal of feedback and a deep, percussive _boom._  

  Nnoitra laughed like a broken hinge over the sudden sounds of ongoing carnage. Tesla could have told them that threatening him wasn't even going to make him hesitate. 

This was a whole military base, though, Tesla thought uncertainly. Surely Nnoitra didn’t think he could fight everyone here? 

He thought about the space station then, and --  

Fuck. Maybe Nnoitra did think he could fight everyone here. Maybe Nnoitra _could_ fight everyone here. 

Tesla hadn't exactly seen a lot of proof to the contrary.  

“He doesn’t care about you very much, does he?” asked the soldier whose weapon was still trained on Tesla. 

He moved cautiously through the shuttle, one heavy flat-soled boot in front of the other, crunching on scrap and discarded bits of plasticky packaging until he could get behind Tesla and take his hands to tie them.  

Tesla didn’t respond because he was occuppied with he sudden heart-stopping realisation that he’d thrown up almost everything he’d eaten today. Which meant that as soon as the hormone rush from the simple act of vomiting had worn off, he as going to be really hungry. 

Ravenous, even.

He swallowed a sudden rush of bile and saliva in his mouth. 

Already he could hear his own heart rate slowing and turning huge and thunderous and deep in his ears.

“Hey. Are you even listening to me?” asked the soldier, toeing him in the back. Tesla’s hands were tied and the soldier had lowered but not holstered their weapon.

“Would it be weird if I ate that,” Tesla said, peering at the pale creamy pool of his vomit. Some had soaked into the knee of his trousers. The less nauseated he felt, the less it smelled disgusting to him -- and now all he could smell from it was sugars and fats, nutrients he wasn’t absorbing. 

Tesla licked his lips. Even the acid on them didn’t taste too bad now.

Ohhhh. He was _so hungry._ It burned and cramped in his guts and made his breath come hard and shallow.

“Uh... like a dog?” The soldier seemed unsure how to respond. “Yeah, that would be _very weird_. What the fuck?”

It felt bad. And... There was a small, terrible part of him that knew it would be so easy to fix. All he had to do... 

... was reach out and _feed_.

“Have you got any food?” Tesla asked faintly, drowned out by the roar of his own blood. 

The yelling and screeching outside the shuttle didn’t really register properly anymore, except for the vague feeling that people were moving out there, but the scent of blood did -- and worse, somebody ad been struck by blaster fire. Burnt human smelled a lot like cooking pork.

“Do you understand that you’re being taken into custody here...?”

“I’m hungry,” said Tesla. 

He could feel saliva flooding his mouth and his blood rushed like a river, answering to the pounding of his heart beat like a fist upon a colossal door. 

“Look, nobody cares about that right now,” the soldier said, and gave him another sharp prod in the back with the toe of his boot. Tesla felt it reverberate from his back into his ribs, which spiked again with pain. 

That hurt, but it seemed so far away in comparison the hunger. He was past shaking and crying about it, and past begging for food even, and now he could feel the ghost of a far away irritation adding to the cold gnawing in his belly. 

The feeling seemed to grow and grow, frustration and hunger feeding into each other. Why was it Tesla stuck here, on his knees in a crashed ship on a foreign planet? Why was it Tesla who had a blaster aimed at him, and some smug ignorant idiot demanding his compliance?

He was hungry and he hurt and he felt bad and the man behind him smelled like-- like -- 

“Shit,” muttered the soldier, and then in a quieter voice, turned toward his communications unit, “--something wrong with him, I don’t know, he’s stoned or something--”

“--a little fuckin’ busy here, Aramaki--” came the tinny response. 

Tesla ground his teeth. There was nothing wrong with him, he was just hungry. He was hungry, and tired, and injured, and frustrated, and none of this was his fault, and it would serve them all right if he-- if he--

The feeling swelled in him, and all his careful self discipline fell away, and Tesla thought, _why shouldn’t I?_ even though he knew intimately, exactly why he shouldn’t.

All Tesla had to do was reach out and **_eat._**

“Guess I’m stuck babysitting you for now,” muttered the soldier. "Don't, like, OD or anything, okay?"

“Stupid,” said Tesla, and his voice went growling and gut-deep on the last syllables -- bottomless, thunderous, dark, _hungry_. 

He felt the bright snap of something inside his chest. His vision washed red and just like the rising well of hunger in his belly, he, too, began to expand. 

Everything around him became very small, very fast. 

The soldier babysitting him yelped and raised his blaster again, so Tesla took his gun hand off at the shoulder. He flung the weapon down with a distant clatter and then sank his teeth into the arm. 

Hot, rich blood flooded his mouth and throat. The bones in the man’s arm crunched when he bit down. 

It was _so good_.

The roof of the shuttle struck Tesla’s head -- again -- but this time it crumpled like aluminium foil around the bulk of his shoulders. He shook himself, annoyed at the weight of scraps hanging off him, and a sheet of metal tumbled free from one enormous, razor-sharp tusk and slammed into the floor next to his foot with a crash.

 The soldier was still yelling, clutching his shoulder and staring up -- and _up_ \-- at Tesla even as he made an abortive scramble for his blaster. 

Everything smelled like blood and fresh meat, and Tesla was so hungry.

He scooped the shrieking soldier up by the leg and peeled him from its armour like a child unwrapping an easter egg, sending twisted bits of metal and cloth raining down to clatter on the busted roof of the shuttle. 

The screaming stopped before he was quite done, but it was still hot and wet and fresh when he shoved the whole thing in his mouth. 

He exhaled a long, shaky breath when he was done with that one. There was blood -- and thicker fluids -- on his snout and lining his tusks and smeared down his chest, tangling in his fur where it thickened over his groin and his thighs. 

He broke more of the shuttle roof extricating himself, but it had pretty much been a write-off to begin with. They’d crash-landed, he realised, either by accident or by Nnoitra’s bloodthirsty design, into the military base itself. That explained both the sheer number of personnel scrambling around like well-armed fire ants, and why nobody had fired on them with anything bigger than a blaster -- they'd have taken their own people out.

“Fuck,” he heard Nnoitra says somewhere, and then louder, “ _Fuck_ ,” all breathless and exultant, just like he had when Tesla fucked him, but he didn’t look for him. Nnoitra was not food, because there was already such an abundance. 

Tesla was hungry, so he wasn't looking for Nnoitra. 

He was hungry, and he wasn’t going to think of anything but food until he was sated. 

His bones settled in their transformation with a final shuddering crack and Tesla shook his head, twisting his neck and shaking out his mane. He felt... He felt better already. Good, even. He’d been confined in his small, sweet little form for so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like to truly cut loose. He never would have, even here, because it was so hard to think clearly in this shape... but hunger drove him, and anger made it seem so attractive. 

Nnoitra had left soldiers sprawled around, dead and dying in warm bloodied heaps. Part of Tesla looked at them and thought _flesh, hot, blood, **feast**_ and another, smaller part wondered why Nnoitra hadn’t eaten any himself. (Maybe this was why he was so skinny. Maybe he didn’t know... how...) 

Something slammed into Tesla’s snout. He flinched back and rubbed at it with one huge, filthy hand. Blaster fire, he thought blankly, and then: _they’re trying to hurt me._ That was sort of funny. His food was trying... trying to... His face _hurt_. Tesla didn’t like that.  

Tesla crushed two people into a wall with the casual swipe of his hand. The wall cracked.

There was more fire, stinging and painful on his skin, but it was unable to penetrate the thick layer of hard fat beneath it. It did not slow him down. He collected another soldier in his hand and shoved it into his mouth, crunching through ribs to get right to the rich organs underneath. They steamed, briefly, exposed to the air when he took a giant bite out, but he ate too fast for it to last. 

Another body went _snap_ under his foot and another voice cut short. And another. Another. 

He was so hungry, and it was just so good to finally eat his fill that it got the better of him for a while. It was uncomplicated and easy. The whole world narrowed to the wet snappings of death and the rosy haze of his vision and the taste of hot, sweet meat.

At some point there were big, metal drones, some almost as big as he was, but there was an alien -- less short than the rest, with gleaming horns, and who he only vaguely recognised at the time -- who made them crash and then Tesla could completely ignore the metal bits in favour of the smaller but infinitely meatier things inside them. 

They came seething out whenever one went down, and if he was careful he could crack the drones open like cans and scoop out the food within. That was fun. Tesla liked that. 

He was on his knees in the settling silence, gnawing on a woman’s thigh when he finally came down. It happened all at once, in a rush of thought and feeling, and he went from _food - yes - good_ to _where am I? what am I doing?_ within seconds. 

Tesla slowed his chewing and took a deep breath.

He was... He was a mess. 

There was gore all over him... including in his fucking eyes... and... 

After a second of stillness and confusion he took up a long strip of someone’s discarded clothes to dry one hand before swiping some of the mess away from his eyes. He rubbed is hand over his snout, too, but it pretty much only smeared it. It stung, too. He’d been burnt a little by someone’s blaster. Ouch.

...He’d clean up later. 

 _You shouldn’t eat people_ , Tesla chided himself helplessly, but this person was clearly already dead, and marrow was very nutritious, so he cracked her bone between his teeth and sucked it out anyway.

_You're meant to be a medic,_ he reminded himself, licking a particularly tasty bit of someone out from under his nail, _that is the opposite of eating people._

He didn’t need to eat the bone itself. He could exercise that much discipline. He put it down with a clatter. 

Somewhere, something was dripping. It was probably, he thought with some resignation, blood. 

“Are you done?” came Nnoitra’s drawling voice. 

Tesla turned his head, knocking aside a tangle of coarse bloodied blond hair from his mane. He hadn’t smelled him over the carnage, and certainly hadn’t heard him over the sounds of feasting and cracking bones.

There Nnoitra was, perched on the angular wing of an overturned droid with his long, long legs stretched out before him. There was a new enormous gun propped up next to him, just as big as his last two, but he was ignoring it in favour of watching Tesla.

At some point between Tesla eating that first soldier and now, Nnoitra had found the time and opportunity to clean up a bit. He was wearing the trousers from a soldier’s uniform tucked into his own long boots -- Tesla could see the hilt of a long knife peeking out -- and although he’d evidently been unable to find a coat for someone with four arms, his face and body were clean, shockingly pale against the backdrop of grey stone and broken metal and slaughter. 

His bandages were stained, though. That wasn't good. They should do something about that.

Tesla glanced around. There were a lot of partially-consumed people here -- mostly with their soft bellies ripped open and the innards scooped out. Tesla’s diet was often sparse on iron because it just wasn’t economical, but he’d always loved offal. It showed.

“Yeah,” he said. It came out in a thick, rumbling grunt that rose up from his chest. “I’m done.”

“We need to get out of here before reinforcements arrive,” Nnoitra said, but his remaining eye was still fixed on Tesla and he made no move to get up. 

Right. Distantly Tesla knew there were reasons why that was a sensible decision but they were hard to grasp firmly in this form. Tesla got up from his haunches, a little wobbly on his feet -- he was injured, and in a while he’d begin to really feel it. 

But now that he was full and glutted and out of immediate danger, it wasn’t so easy to focus on anything but Nnoitra, sitting over there with his huge sharp horns and his mile long legs, all sprawled out over the wing of the droid they'd taken down together. And he wasn’t helping, either, because he was staring with his one dark eye at Tesla -- worse still, at the heavy fur between Tesla’s thighs.

 Tesla lumbered inexorably toward him, steadier with every step. Nnoitra’s gaze shifted up to his face, and his lips peeled back to uncover his long white teeth. 

“There’s a ship that’ll fit you,” he said, getting to his feet only when he was almost in reach of Tesla’s big hands. 

He moved himself out of reach pretty quickly. That was a shame. Tesla was full. Tesla did not want to eat him at _all_. 

Nnoitra started walking, and Tesla followed dumbly like a puppet drawn on its strings. They moved through the bloodied and ruined facility and past the wreckage of the shuttle in which they’d arrived.

The dripping sound grew louder, and then faded away. Around them nothing moved.

Nnoitra took him to a hangar where he stalked past light shuttle after light shuttle, past military freights and huge passenger ships and comparatively small drones and jets. In the deepest part of the hangar, carefully sectioned off - and with a door whose closure was a smoking ruin -- was a war ship. 

This was not a small ship.

And, yeah, Tesla would fit on this one.

Its huge body gleamed under the lights that came up as they moved through. It was sleek, yes, designed to manoeuvre, but even Tesla’s indifferent eyes could see that it wasn’t designed for fast courier trips.

On one side was written in enormous text: HMS PAIN.

Yeah, thought Tesla, that’d just about get them out of Bredtopia-controlled space. This was the concept that really filtered through to Tesla when he looked upon it, although later he would have room inside to think about supplies and personnel and whether or not Bredtopia's military could afford to let them leave with a ship like this one...

“Good,” he rumbled then, and placidly followed Nnoitra abroad. The entry was so large that all sixteen rippling feet of him barely had to stoop. 

Tesla followed him through the ship, and then into the bridge for no good reason, and then because he couldn't seem to take his stupid eyes off him, he dropped to his haunches behind the pilot's seat. At least Nnoitra seemed to find this attachment funny, instead of threatening or annoying. The ship gave only a gentle creak beneath Tesla's enormous weight. 

Despite the unfamiliarity of the ship, with the help of the AI, Nnoitra had them in the air within ten minutes and leaving the dirty red planet behind within twenty.

They hit travelling speed while Tesla was still picking bits of dead people from his hair. Mostly it was a red that dried to brown and flaked, so probably the base had been largely staffed with humans.

He almost missed the sound of the AI confirming that they were en route and the computer was taking over for the duration, but he could not possibly have missed the _click-snap_ of Nnoitra's boots coming closer. 

Tesla had never had sex in this shape, which suddenly seemed like a terrible oversight now that he was the focus of Nnoitra's attention.

"Show me," Nnoitra demanded, and then, breathing harder, "show me, show me--" 

In this shape, Nnoitra did not have enough leverage to pin him, and could no sooner toss him around than grow wings, but it didn't matter: Tesla’s huge body was still and compliant under Nnoitra’s many long-fingered hands.

He groped under Tesla’s grime-streaked fur until he hit flesh, and then he drew out the thick length of his cock. Tesla twitched, both at the sudden contact and the cold touch of the air. There was a reason his dick was covered by all that fur, and it was not for modesty. 

There was a frozen moment when all he could hear was the thump of his pulse and the whine of machinery deep in the ship. 

Nnoitra seemed mesmerised. 

Then he wrapped his fingers loosely around the shaft of Tesla’s cock and made a soft noise low in his throat when they did not quite touch around its circumference. 

In a distant way, Tesla wondered if maybe this was a bad thing, if Nnoitra was about to lose his temper because of some kind of -- of _penis size insecurity thing_. That wasn’t impossible -- it did happen in some cultures, although shapeshifters didn’t, on the whole, really buy into it. But most of Tesla’s brain was torn between excitement -- _his hand’s on my cock_ \-- and fear -- _he’s very dangerous and his hand’s on my cock_. 

It was a little bit disconcerting to realise that the fear made the excitement stronger. Tesla was going to keep being stupid for Nnoitra, apparently.

When Nnoitra finally looked up his expression was not angry or even resentful, though. 

His face was flushed high across the bones of his cheeks and nose, discolouring oddly around the organs beneath his eye. He licked his bottom lip and it gleamed under the bright overhead lights. His pupil was huge and black, with only a thin ring of violet iris still showing around its edge. 

The huge pupil and glazed expression seemed so profound a change that for a moment Tesla thought, _that’s not right_ and wondered if he’d been hit in the head. Was it okay to have allowed him to pilot this ship with a concussion, and --

“I’m gonna fuck you til one of us is _dead,_ ” Nnoitra moaned, cutting off his train of thought with every appearance of sincerity. 

_Oh,_ thought Tesla, rapidly catching up. Nnoitra hooked a foot around one of Tesla’s massive ankles -- pasterns, really -- and yanked, dumping him to the floor with an almighty thump. The ship’s floor shuddered but otherwise it seemed unaffected by the impact. 

Tesla remembered, then, Nnoitra’s sheer physical strength, how overwhelming he’d been earlier, how sturdy his lean and pale body was. It would be almost impossible to seriously injure Nnoitra by accident. 

Tesla scooped him up with a single, huge hand and dumped him across his thighs. Nnoitra let out a startled, delighted whoop.

“Oh, _fuck_ yes,” he purred, spreading all three hands possessively over the hard ridges and dips of Tela’s heavily-muscled belly. Tesla could feel Nnoitra’s short nails scraping, could marvel at how little he weighed. 

Nnoitra made thin, excited noises in his throat when Tesla’s cock came to life under his hand. 

“Fuck me, it gets bigger,” he muttered, and Tesla kept waiting for him to stop and say, _no, too big, I can’t,_ but he never did -- not when he rolled Tesla’s foreskin back to explore the plush damp head of his dick, not when he licked the glans and rolled his hot velvety tongue all the way down the thick, straining vein in the underside. 

They made an enormous, slick mess with the medical-grade lube in the ship’s stores, not least because Tesla’s fingers were huge and clumsy. 

After a few mildly hilarious attempts, Nnoitra smacked his hands away and used his own long, dextrous fingers to stretch himself, working rapidly against his own internal muscles.

"Come on, come on," he growled, staring covetously at Tesla's cock. 

No patience, Tesla thought distantly, and smoothed one huge hand down his spine. He was pleased to get a shiver in response.

Even then, when Nnoitra finally sprawled his thighs out over Tesla’s huge body and tried to take the entire thick length of his cock inside him all at once, he never even hesitated. In fact he made loud and increasingly breathy groans of delight, and every time Tesla thought he was going to have to give up, he just gave another long sigh and swore a bit and bore down more, harder. The muscles inside him tensed, slippery and wet with lubricant, and so warm and tight -- they clenched reflexively, desperately tight around Tesla's cock, squeezing and releasing with Nnoitra's every heavy breath.

“Fuck,” Nnoitra said at last, shaking with his pale thighs trembling and all his hands clenched in helpless fists, tugging at Tesla’s fur. “ _Fuck._ Keep -- keep--”

So Tesla wrapped his own hands around Nnoitra’s hips. With both of them there his fingers overlapped, and he felt like he could have snapped him in half with only a little effort. Instead he pushed him down, steady and hard, and rocked his hips up into it. It was slow but inexorable, and he felt Nnoitra’s legs give an abortive twitch even as he watched the mesmerising sight of his cock disappearing into the tight soft grip of his body. 

“Shit.” Nnoitra wheezed and thumped one hand into his stomach, hard, which made Tesla look up to his face just in time to see his remaining eye roll back in his skull. 

Nnoitra’s nails dug in then, and his chest heaved and his breath came out hard against Tesla's chest. There was a moment where he seemed to wonder if he had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew, because he clenched his teeth and met Tesla’s gaze and on a shaky exhale he said, “That’s all of it?”

He braced his hand over his stomach, like he could feel the pressure of Tesla’s cock from the outside, and something low in Tesla’s guts gave a hot delicious throb at the sight. 

Tesla grunted. “Yes.”

“Fffuck,” said Nnoitra again, dropping his head forward and breathing deeply. His dark hair drew long silky patterns across Tesla’s stomach, a cold counterpoint to the warmth of his body. 

He took another two deep breaths while Tesla held still for him. He wanted to move, wanted to roll his hips with all the massive strength in his huge form, to hold Nnoitra down to him, pull him close and slam up into him, hard and quick -- 

But he did not. Nnoitra never even needed to tell him to be still, and the discipline came easily. Finally Nnoitra’s breath evened out and he gave a short grunt. He levered himself up again, muscles straining, and the long slow draw of it made Tesla squeeze his own eyes shut. He came down with a loud gasping moan and for a second Tesla saw stars. A hot, heady lick of pleasure went through him with every movement.  

  Nnoitra swore, loudly, and did it again, and again, until he’d made a rhythm of it, keening and grunting with every huge punched-out breath.  

Nnoitra rode him like that, with his breath coming in grunts and gasps and his whole body heaving, seething with heat and shining with sweat that made him gleam under the lights. He had an expression of mildly torturous bliss, and all Tesla could do was lay beneath him in dazed and rapturous submission.  

Nnoitra screamed when he came, a loud, shameless screech, and when he came down from his orgasm he was shaking, muscles weak and joints all loose and relaxed. His muscles kept clenching and twitching abortively around Tesla’s cock, and Tesla wasn’t -- wasn't quite done, not yet, but close enough that he was gasping. So he grabbed him around the middle -- where he was heaving for breath, hard and exhausted -- and he drew his long body up and slammed it down again, grinding up into him. And even though it probably hurt -- it must have, at least a little -- all Nnoitra managed was a drunken, “Oh fuck. Oh fuck,” and a long, long moan.  

When they were done, finally, it took Nnoitra two tries to get off, between his trembling thighs and shaking core muscles and general exhaustion. Then he starfished his whole rangy body across Tesla’s broad chest and growled in a voice gone hoarse and low with yelling, “Don’t wake me up unless someone’s fucking shooting at us.” 

And Tesla purred low in his belly and supposed, dizzily, that was a job well done.  

It certainly felt kind of like an achievement, this, having reduced Nnoitra to roughly the consistency of poorly set jelly.  

He spent maybe ten minutes feeling disproportionately proud of himself before he realised that Nnoitra was sound asleep on top of him and now he could never move from the floor of the bridge again.  

He wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but the floor was cold and this bigger form burnt a lot of fuel. Tesla hoped Nnoitra woke up before he got hungry again... 

In the end this wasn’t an issue: he drifted off with one huge warm hand covering Nnoitra’s spine, and Nnoitra was getting up when he woke, staggering off to the pilot’s seat to check how far they’d come in their stolen ship without bothering to find his (equally stolen) trousers.  

Pretty far, as it turned out: they’d be in unclaimed space within forty hours, flying on to parts unknown with a well-supplied and heavily armoured warship.  

Nnoitra slumped in the head pilot’s seat and spun it to face Tesla. He watched disinterestedly as Tesla shifted back into something small and humanoid. The wet tearing noises and the cracking of bones didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. 

A lot of contradictory thoughts and considerations flooded back when he transformed. But mostly, if Tesla was honest, he looked at Nnoitra -- naked and completely unashamed even though there was definitely semen drying on his lean-muscled thighs -- and thought, _I want to put my hands all over him,_ and _I wonder when we can fuck again_ , and _maybe he’ll let me suck his cock again._  

And that was how Tesla knew he was really, solidly fucked, because there were about sixty other things he should have been focused on, like where they were, what he was going to do now, his own injuries, _Nnoitra's_ injuries, if there were antibiotics in their supplies, if there was enough food on board --  

“You can pick where you want to get off,” Nnoitra offered. His eye was calculating and his mouth was a thin unhappy line, although he didn’t seem annoyed by the prospect of letting Tesla down wherever, exactly. That was more magnanimous than Tesla had really expected of him -- maybe loud, athletic sex with someone sufficiently obedient improved his temper.  

Tesla bit his lip. “What will you do?” 

“Me?” Nnoitra paused, then grunted. “Take a contract. Not a legal one, probably, but a contract’s a contract. At least I’ll be able to pick my own now. No bodyguarding.” 

Tesla licked his teeth. “Like an assassination? 

“Something like that,” Nnoitra agreed. Then he shot Tesla a derisive glance. “Feeling squeamish?” 

“No,” said Tesla, easy and placid. He chewed on his bottom lip again, and then, feeling unsettled and vulnerable, he made probably his stupidest decision to date. But -- well, he wasn’t going to get what he wanted if he didn’t ask for it. “I might come along, if you... if you don’t mind.” 

Nnoitra glanced at him, both surprised and suspicious. His mouth twisted. His eye narrowed. “Why?” 

Tesla paused, because he couldn’t quite come out and say ‘because I am absolutely gone on you and cannot stop myself,’ without a) sounding absolutely insane, and b) risking that Nnoitra might fire him into the nearest star for talking about his feelings. 

“I have nowhere to go -- my license isn’t any good outside the allied empire, and I can’t go back there now.” Not after _eating most of a military base_ , anyway. People definitely frowned upon that kind of thing. “But... I can be useful,” he added.  

Surely Nnoitra did not want to be all alone on the HMS PAIN for ages anyway? And Tesla was useful, even if he might cost a lot to feed...  

He peered hopefully but uncertainly at Nnoitra, feeling unaccountably insecure.  

Nnoitra’s single eye bored right into him for a few long seconds. "Yeah, all right," he said finally. Then he scoffed deep in his throat. “I bet I can find something to do with you."

Tesla did not think he was talking about his skills a medic. "I look forward to it."

**Author's Note:**

>  **End note warnings:** graphic violence, porn with absolutely un-negotiated kink including choking, cannibalism, misogyny and sexism from Nnoitra, vomiting and several mentions of specific numbers of calories in different foods. 
> 
> The worldbuilding is also ridiculous and absolutely none of the science makes sense. I believe that about covers it.
> 
> (Also I'm sorry that there's no interesting and exciting alien genitals. I know. A missed opportunity.)
> 
> Here seems like a good spot to shamelessly plug [nnoites week on tumblr](https://nnoitesweek.tumblr.com)


End file.
